A different person depending on the language - Swissinfo.ch
Many polyglots switch to a different personality when switching languages: they argue more reservedly in Mandarin than in Swiss German, are more emotional in Albanian or prefer to solve problems in English.
What is behind this phenomenon?
In the family kitchen, the steam vent is roaring, the children have just come home. “I speak almost exclusively Italian with them,” says author and yoga teacher Elisa Malinverni in the broadest Bernese dialect of Swiss German.
Her two children always answer in German. Today, however, the older son interjects: “Mängisch parleni o Italiano!” There is a colourful back and forth, a switching between Italian and Swiss German in this house. And yet: for Malinverni, each language has its own function. “On the one hand, Italian is for me the language of slogans. There’s this flirt vibe, and I can let my inner Sophia Loren run free. But Italian also has a certain austerity because it’s deeply connected to my mother, a very authoritarian figure in my life.”
What was still frowned upon in her own parental home, switching between Italian and German, the mother of two now consciously uses as a tool in everyday life: “when I have to push my children in the morning, I switch to Swiss German. Then I’m less strict with them than in Italian.”