Languages form an essential part of someone’s identity: your native language is perhaps something that defines you the most in everyday life. One of my previous blogs regarding MFD, Moroccan Flavoured Dutch, shows that MFD is most likely to be related to certain ethnicities, as well as some cultures, such as hiphop or rap. Therefore language is something that is bigger than how you communicate: it is something that defines you as a person and thus it becomes your identity.
Aneta Pavlenko discusses this identity topic that is present regarding languages. As someone who is a native Ukranian and moved to the US, she might be having two different identities. In the past, she has asked herself whether people change their identity when they adopt a different language: she mentions some waive these questions away as simplistic.
In dealing with this topic myself, I have to say that whenever I speak another language, I do not conciously change my behaviour. It works the other way around: I have become the person that I am right now, partly because of the languages that I speak. As someone who is born and raised in Limburg, the Netherlands, I was raised multilingually: I speak Dutch with my dad and sister, while Limburgs is spoken with my mom and girlfriend. In other words, my languages have made me who I am.
On this note, I tend to agree with Amin Maalouf, Lebanese-French writer. In his book, Les Identités meurtrières (2001), he touches upon his roots and, more specifically, on the question whether he is Lebanese or French and he states that one identity does not oppress the other. As a result, he believes that he is not half Lebanese, half French: the identity of someone does not fully come from where the origins of this person are, one’s identity consists of many more elements. Identity is not something that should be compartimentalised: if anything, he argues, you only have one identity and that is your own.
While I personally recognise most of this, a sidenote to this argument should be added, namely that people still affiliate in a certain sense with their country of origin. Take the case of Moroccan-Dutch football players in the Netherlands. There have been numerous football players who have Moroccan roots and even though they have the Dutch nationality and even lived for almost their entire life in the Netherlands, they went on to choose to play for the Moroccan team eitherway. Players such as Hakim Ziyech, Nordin Amrabat and Oussama Idrissi were eligible to play for Oranje, yet they chose the Lions of the Atlas. However, Maalouf might provide an explanation for this phenomenon, stating that within one’s identity, there is always a certain hierarchy. Although this hierarchy is present in every individual, sometimes external factors can bring radical changes, as Maalouf illustrates with the example of the homosexual Italian living during the fascist period. In this illustration, the Italian obviously prefers to be able to liberally express his homosexuality, however because of the circumstances he chooses not to, so that he would not be illegal at the time.
While the circumstances obviously have changed now, there is still something to say for this way of thinking, namely that every individual has some hierarchy within their identity, therefore multilingual people consider one language to be their main language.
My personal identity does not feel this deeply divided: having Dutch and Limburgs (and perhaps English as well) as my native languages, you could say there is some division, but to an extent. While I personally have encountered situations in which friends from Amsterdam or Utrecht made some jokes about me sounding Limburgs when I speak Dutch, they still accept that side of me and I have not felt exempted eitherway. In that sense, it makes sense to state that I identify more as being Dutch, rather than being Limburgs. Most importantly, let us not forget the fact that Limburg still makes up one of the provinces of the Netherlands, thus being the Netherlands as well. In that sense, my rebuttal always has been that I am (language-wise) richer than the average Dutch person and some of those very friends!
However, personally I believe that languages are very important in someone’s identity and that this makes up so much more than just the way you communicate on a daily basis: as Gill Valentine et al. (2008) stated in their research conclusion regarding Somali children growing up in Sheffield, UK, the language that these children used, determined their identity and their feeling of belonging to a group in that same sense.
So when you return to the main question, do multilinguals feel and behave like different people when they switch languages? The answer to this is very fluid: your social position is very important in this regard and that not only determines the language you mostly identify with, but in a much broader context your overall identity.
Bibliography
Maalouf, A. (2001). Les Identités Meurtrières. Paris: Bernard Grasset.
Valentine, G.; Sporton, D.; Bang Nielsen, K. (2008). Language use on the move: sites of ecnounter, identities and belonging. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(3). pp. 376-387.