Life in translation

Do you have a different "personality" in each language that you speak?

Hi! I’m in Latin America for a few weeks, and I’m starting to notice my personality in Spanish come back to life. It’s funny how the chip changes so quickly: I express myself more directly (especially in usually-awkward moments), I make different kinds of jokes, and almost all of my dreams switch languages, too.

This happens pretty often now — whether I’m reporting a story, or visiting family, or a combination of both — but I think it might be surprising to hear for people who’ve known me since I was a kid. Thanks to a family history that has spanned continents and cultures, all my life I’ve been surrounded by relatives who speak a mesmerizing mix of languages including:

• Spanish

• Arabic (both Syrian and Judeo-Iraqi dialects)

• Hebrew

• French

(I like to make lists when I write letters)

But my friends in school wouldn’t have known that, because growing up in the United States, no one in my family ever spoke any of their other languages to me, only around me — so I knew only English. I was very monolingual… or so I thought.

I began learning Spanish when I was 12 years old, in seventh grade. The language came quickly to me as I progressed through middle and high school, in ways that calculus or trigonometry did not. I would bring home my schoolwork and my dad or my grandparents would make “corrections” to my verb conjugation charts, crossing out the neutral “tú” we’d learned in class, and instructing me to use the Argentine “vos,” like they did. After hearing them all my life — and listening to more than a few hours a week of soccer commentators like Andrés Cantor on Telemundo and Mariano Closs on FOX Deportes — without understanding what they were saying, I picked up the language, and a hybrid Argentine-American accent, pretty quickly.

In college, I began exploring Latin America on my own. During repeated trips to Colombia and especially Argentina, this “personality” in Spanish started to grow, especially as I was forced to put my English-speaking self to rest for weeks at a time. That’s why, when people ask me how my own life had changed after traversing the Andes in search of my family’s history or journeying down the Río Magdalena, I always say the same thing: before I started doing this kind of work, Spanish was not part of the fabric of my existence. Now, I spend many months each year in South America. At home in New York, itself a fascinating and ever-changing Latin American city, I find myself gravitating towards neighborhoods and spaces where I can feel closer to Quito, Buenos Aires, or Bogotá. I speak with Abuelo and Abuela and so many other friends and relatives in Spanish. And it all feels like I’m living this “other life” that non-Spanish-speakers will never know.

But I also quickly realized that I am far from the only one who feels this way. Many of us grew up around parents, grandparents, or other relatives who spoke in another language that we couldn’t understand — probably even so that we wouldn’t understand. Many of us have tried to learn the language(s) that our families never taught us, only to find new pockets of deep meaning as we move about the world with this newfound knowledge, like clues to a treasure hunt.

Conversely, others of us keep our lives in different languages completely separate, whether deliberately or not. Perhaps we associate certain languages with memories and experiences that we wish to forget.

But I’d wager a good bet that no matter our intentions, most of us would say we “feel like different people” when we speak a first, second, even third or fourth language.

Does any of this sound like you? I would love to hear your thoughts about any multilingual experiences you may have had — even if you “only speak English.” If enough people write me back (by simply replying to this email), I’ll share some of your responses.

All my best,

Jordan -

Summer reading