The Language I Live In: How Linguistic Habits Can Make or Break Your Conversations

Linguistic habits encompass choice of words and topics, tone, and sentence structure aka the way you are when you speak. But in this post, I’d like to extend the term to how multilingual people often have very different kinds of conversations depending on what language they’re speaking—and I think this is more than just code-switching.

The other day my partner and I met up with an old acquaintance who was traveling with his new girlfriend, Bea. She and I hit it off immediately, partly because she’s Portuguese, so we switched to her first language while our partners caught up. The night went by in a blur of semi-translated humor and multilingual anecdotes. A Portuguese, a Romanian, a Pole, and a Brit walk into a natural wine bar—the joke practically writes itself.

But later that night, overthinking the interaction and trying to remember if I’d said anything embarrassing, I realised something. I learned many things about Bea: that she’s into documentaries and baking, loves strawberries and has two cats. She thinks our city, not Lisbon, should be the capital of Portugal (I disagree). She’s not surprised anymore when a famous male writer, actor or musician is revealed to be a sex pest. 

But I had no idea what Bea does for work. It didn’t occur to me to ask her. As we chatted away, I lacked the linguistic habit to even think of the question. I’m simply not used to conversations in Portuguese taking that shape, even though it’s a familiar one in other languages. Instead we glided past and onto other, more personal topics, even while our partners talked about their work.

This got me thinking about the habits we multilinguals form in the different languages we inhabit. And I say inhabit because, sometimes, linguistic and cultural code-switching can feel like rotating through a set of personas. 

People who speak two or more languages have long pointed out that they feel and act differently when switching between languages. One small study of bilingual women showed the participants felt more assertive when speaking Spanish rather than English. Another study, on bilingual English and Cantonese speakers from Hong-Kong, had subjects talk to two interviewers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. When they spoke English to the ethnically Cantonese interviewers, participants tended to be more extraverted, open and assertive. 

This last one is definitely an example of how code-switching can affect personality and behavior, but it also says something about cultural context. When the participants’ and interviewers’ cultures (and languages) matched, the conversation was more likely to follow the rules of that culture. But when they didn’t, participants defaulted to what they considered to be English-language culture, emphasising traits like openness and extraversion. 

And this applies whether speakers are bilingual and bicultural, or they acquired a second language later in life. A study with Swedish participants who spoke English as a second language looked at how language switching affects the Big Five personality traits (these are extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to experience, and they’re broadly used in personality assessments). Participants had to pretend they were applying for a job and complete personality surveys in both languages. The study found that, pretty consistently, the answers in English ranked higher for extraversion. In a parallel experiment where participants had to answer open-ended questions, they described themselves as more conscientious and agreeable when speaking Swedish.

I think there are at least two things going on here. One, people tend to adopt a set of perceived cultural values when speaking different languages. They act more extraverted when they speak English, more conscientious in Swedish or more deferential in Cantonese because they see these traits as part of the cultural contexts of these languages. This seems to happen a lot when the speaker is both bilingual and bicultural.

Two, people who learn a second language tend to associate it with a certain phase like schooling, career or a relationship—all of which in turn carry their own set of linguistic habits. The Russian-American author Keith Gessen shares in his book, Raising Raffi, that he gets “short-tempered” and “yelly” when he speaks to his son in Russian, discovering a register he doesn’t have in English.

A register many of us don’t have in English

That’s what I’m getting at with linguistic habits. To return to the anecdote from earlier, I didn’t ask Bea what she does for work because we were introduced in Portuguese—and in Portuguese, work-related small-talk isn’t a habit for me. I have the vocabulary for it, sure, but it’s not a register I use often, not like in English, the language of my career and schooling.

I believe that, for multilingual people, every language we speak comes with its own registers, habits, common topics and conversational conventions. In Romanian, I’m fluent in gossip, social transgression and feel remarkably emotionally inept. I have virtually no vocabulary for tenderness or vulnerability, but can curse creatively enough to make a sailor blush. The Romanian words for emotions feel inadequate, even inappropriate, like talking about your period in detail at a family dinner. 

In English, I ask “what do you do for work?”, flirt, joke and use the language elastically, as a tool for entertainment and information sharing. I feel competent talking emotions and speaking my mind. My partner and I speak English with each other and with most of our friends; I grew up bilingual and, by and large, the media I consume is in English. It’s also the language of my career—every job I’ve had so far has been in English, I’ve networked and interviewed, given and received feedback, run meetings and tutorials.

I’ve only recently achieved a decent level of fluency in Portuguese after moving herel in 2020. For me, it’s mainly a social language—how are you? what time are we meeting? I brought wine, hummus and a blanket. Since I’ve never had to use it for work, I lack the same linguistic habits. It’s more “what do you like to do?” and less “what’s your job?”.

And I don’t necessarily think it’s because Portuguese culture isn’t work-oriented—I’ve met and befriended plenty of hard-working, ambitious career ladder climbers here. It’s just that I haven’t had the chance to form this linguistic habit yet. And it’s possible that, until I do, I’ll go through a phase of sounding, as writer Olga Khazan puts it in her own article on multilinguals, lobotomized whenever I try to express myself on the topic. As with all habits, linguistic ones also need building.