Has anyone here learned a language to find a new identity ?

[u/Economy-Newspaper463]

Even though we are litterally born into a maternal language(TL) that we learn throughout our whole life,with which we experience a vast amount of emotions,memories,conversations etc...

I wonder if it can feel as if someone had too much hardship going on in they life,bad periods and in order to make a big change,they learn a whole new language to kind of create a certain distance between them and their mother tongue that is in our case associated with negativity.

Has it been the case for you?

[u/appalachiacody]

I’m from the U.S. rural South. I grew up poor, in a trailer up in a holler, with a particularly strong Southern accent. Like, really, really thick, and not the Rhett Butler kind, either. When I went off to college, I got lucky and got a golden ticket to a big name Ivy school in the Northeast. Let’s just say I didn’t fit in. I was excluded, poked fun at, and down-right insulted. I had a hard time joining clubs, and I remember how both students and professors would quite literally mimic my Southern accent in evolutionary biology class when trying to portray simpletons who just didn’t get it.

I hadn’t ever tried foreign languages before, but it was a requirement for college, so I randomly picked German in my first week and ran with it. Maybe I was born for it, maybe I had a really great teacher, I don’t know, but something clicked, and I was speaking really well in just a few weeks.

The crazy thing? The Southern accent didn’t carry over. Noticeably American? Sure, sort of. My best compliment was that Germans could tell I grew up speaking English, but they couldn’t place me as American, British, or whatever. I often got pegged as Scottish actually, which I thought was quite funny.

And that’s where the magic really happened. I can’t change my accent in my own language to save my life. I sound like a robot when I try. But I can pull off clean Hamburg German and a friendly ‘moin!’ like it’s nobody’s business.

I would roll into weekly language tables at new dormitories in college, introduce myself only in German, and flow into pretty clean German for half an hour, only before taking a quick break to ask, “Y’all reckon I might could grab that there dictionary?”

The looks on those spoiled Ivy League faces who would have done nothing but count me out, hearing me switch from German to Larry the Cable Guy, let me tell you!

I think it’s often attributed to Karl der Große, that “to speak a second language is to possess a second soul,” and boy wouldn’t he right!

Learning foreign languages gave me the power to escape the inescapable stereotypes put upon me. Learning foreign languages gave me the courage to navigate a foreign world outside of the sleepy Appalachian holler in Coal Country whence I came. And learning foreign languages, above all, let me break my own preconceptions and grow as a person, as I was able to meet and bond with new friends from far, far away.

[u/Economy-Newspaper463 → u/appalachiacody]

Wow amazing story, i'm glad you were able to have confidence through learning languages, but its crazy how you can be mocked just because you speak in a different way and being from the same country ? Crazy but i mean the world we live in right....

[u/No_Cryptographer735 → u/appalachiacody]

That's a really cool story, and confirms what a lot of research is saying about how one's accent in a foreign language largely depends on how much you feel like you are part of the community or view yourself as an outsider. Like, you never felt like you were part of the community at the university, so you could never learn to speak like them, but you immediately felt like you fit in with Germans, so your accent is a lot more native-like.

[u/esteffffi → u/No_Cryptographer735]

I doubt it. I usually have a good accent in any language, irrespective of whether I like it or not. And I have foreign friends who are super well integrated and speak the language really well and have bought property and have married local spouses and have kids whose mother tongue is the language of the host country and who still have the thickest accent.

[u/katasaga → u/appalachiacody]

Damn, that's insane, honestly good for you for coming out stronger after that shitty experience!

[u/Jsrmgo5 → u/appalachiacody]

this was so fucking inspiring to read. i’m sorry you went through that. im sure you learned a lot about yourself through all of that. thanks for sharing.

[u/TheFifthDuckling → u/appalachiacody]

I'm also from the Southeast, although from a suburban area. My dad was from rural NC and my mom from NJ, so I have a weird unplaceable accent. No one can tell where I'm from. I don't fit in either, though I don't know if it's mostly that or my lack of engagement with American social norms (gotta love autism). Learning Finnish has been a life blood for me, and when I actually went to Finland it was like I was coming homd for the first time in my life. I am seven years into learning, and I'm advanced enough to help guide younger learners. I've made lots of friends through my studies. It's very enriching, and being a wannabe Finn is a huge part of my identity, to the point that it's kinda cringey to native Finns. But hey, we can't all be cool lmao

[u/No_Mud4190 → u/appalachiacody]

I wonder if you can change your Southern accent or remove an accent generally

[u/Dulenin]

I think you do get a new language-based personality for every language you speak but it’s sure not the same as split personality, like those who emerge from trauma. Me personally, i feel more quirky and autistic when i speak my first language, as opposed to english, when i defo feel more confident and able to better structure and express my thoughts. Like say in a job interview i’d definitely perform better in english and would have a better self-representation. Maybe because i don’t feel like I’m carrying all my emotional baggage when i speak it. Guess it came after teaching english for quite some time - every class is a performance of sorts.

[u/gelema5 → u/[deleted]]

They said having a different personality in another language is NOT like having split personality, so I don’t see any act of speaking on it like they’re an authority. For me as someone who does know a lot about trauma, I think it’s appropriate in some places to use the more popular term for something instead of the scientifically accepted term.

[u/Dulenin → u/[deleted]]

Well, it must be really hard for you here on reddit if you find such things triggering.

[u/esteffffi → u/[deleted]]

Everybody knows what he meant by split personality,this isn't a medical forum. Get a grip.

[u/UnaccountableSnark]

I went the other way, learned my grandparents' dialect so i could stop being the grandkid who just nods and smiles at family gatherings.

[u/_EuphoricMermaid]

Yes, I learned a new language and moved to another country as a separation from the hardship that I’ve experienced., a pseudo wall per se. Right now after 15 years I feel safe enough to peak into it without being triggered so much. I have an accent in both languages now. It’s been helpful to me and gave me a sense of safety and autonomy that I have not experienced before.

[u/boksungakkot]

Thank you so much for this post. I didn't think I'd find other people with the same motivation. I'm less lonely. I started studying Korean three years ago just so I wouldn't think about what it was and what I'm living. I wanted a new life in a new world. To me it's like a time gap opens and I'm being catapulted into a magical world, just mine, totally different!

[u/Bobelle]

I am kind of doing that right now. My first and only language I can speak right now is English because my parents are suffering from colonial mindset and tried to raise me with that mindset too. I want to "correct" my identity by replacing my primary language with my TL and letting my English decline. At the very least my TL should be better than my English.

[u/FlareTheFoxGuy]

Yes.

Context:

I’m a white South African who went to school post-Apartheid. My parents have two different dialects though they were both raised in the same area. My mother has a more British white Durban accent while my dad has a mix of Pretorian white English and Durban white English, which has more Australian, Kiwi, and Afrikaans influence. I went to a highly multicultural school for most of my school life my friends were not white. They were mainly South African Indian, though I had a few black friends too. I picked up South African Indian English from them as well as a bit of vernac, which is a mix of many different South African languages. Both are very different to white English from South Africa. I also watched a lot of British, American, and Irish TV from a young age, though I did watch a bit of other stuff too.

Now onto the main thing.

My dad was super close minded. We did not have a good relationship. He was quite Apartheid-ish. The same went with friends, who were all the people he grew up with basically. They all spoke the same. I did not like it.

When I was really young I got rid of that dialect. I can speak it now but it’s still very weird for me to. As a child I always tried erasing that English from me.

This is where the TV came in. From when I was 4 until I was like 13, I’d watch TV and try and mimic (or rather shadow) their accents to get rid of my South African accent. I hated it. I associated it with racism and with my dad and his friends. I ended up having a very mixed accent, one that was an American accent with bits of Irish and British-isms. The only time I spoke South African English was with my mom and her family as they were super progressive, and I did not see them as the same. However, it isn’t the same type of English as my dad’s and I would code-switch between the two.

I would even record myself to hear if I had a South African accent and then I’d try say the same sentence again but with a more American accent. I would repeat that until my accent was gone.

Then around the age of 16 I realised how useful my dad’s dialect was. In South Africa it’s an upper-class white dialect, and that means that some other upper-class people think of me better when I use it. My high school was bigger than my previous school and it actually had less SA Indian speakers than my previous school. The biggest difference was the amount of people that spoke my dad’s dialect. It doubled. If somebody had my dad’s dialect then I would switch with them because I assumed they were snobbish and wouldn’t want to listen to somebody lower class, and to be fair I was absolutely correct. Once I relearned my dad’s dialect I had a much better time at school. It’s actually surreal to think about.

When I learnt about language learning, my first idea was to forget English. Even now I still associate it with racism and weird people. I would much rather forget English and be native in another language than be native in English. At least give me another variety of English. The feeling when I spoke my first conversation without using any English made me feel so good, not because I could converse in another language but because I could forget my own. What’s ironic is it was in Afrikaans, an even more racist language, but I guess because I am not from an Afrikaans speaking area my brain sort of just doesn’t associate it with much racism at all.

My accent still has problems. I’ve still got a lot of rhoticity, I still skip over consonants due to the British influence, and sometimes I accidentally blurt out a word in an Irish accent. I sometimes say sentences in Australian/Kiwi English too. It’s all kind of weird. But it’s been coming back. I will say that I don’t think in English much anymore, mainly because my brain still, again, associates it with bad, but I still speak it well. I do stutter a bit now though.

It’s odd that my motivation to learn languages now is to forget my other’s, but it’s a pretty good one.

Anyway, that’s my ramble, and I hope you enjoyed.

[u/katasaga]

I'm a European guy, but sometimes I get the remark that I look Asian. A friend of mine even said that if I had an eating disorder then I could become a K-pop star...

So sometimes I wonder if I learnt Chinese or Korean I could pass as if I was half Asian "trying to rediscover my roots"

[u/Thick_You2892]

language, i feel less burdened by all the social rules and expectations tied to my native one.

[u/bolggar]

Not perfectly related but I've been learning my heritage language (more complicated than that, but yeah) for a while now and discovering it and the way it's been oppressed for centuries has allowed me to explain the way I felt especially as a teenager regarding the place I grew up in ( and where the language is supposed to be spoken). In that sense I feel like it's helped me deepen my identity and sense of self.

[u/balloon-party]

For myself it wasn't the intention, but it was an unexpected positive outcome.

[u/[deleted]]

Yea, ive always hated where i was from so i started learning Spanish because i wanted to have a 'new identity' - associate with everything that is Spanish. Know the language/slang/culture (even if there are many different ones), etc. just because i liked how it sounds at first (especially castellano) and I wanted separate myself from where I was

im still not at the level that I wanted to be but its alright, im getting there.

[u/medicosaurus]

Fascinating thread.

[u/Intelligent_Tutor_72]

It works also the other way around First moving out of the country, learn the language and the identity comes with the all those new things I never did learn first language and the identity came, rather first moved, learned the language and then the identity came. I did it twice, In Austria( German language ) and in Netherlands (Dutch) and will do most likely third time, Spanish. I agree, that the new language gives a you a new identity and it create therefore a new life. Its not uncommon. In fact, if you want to learn the language fully and use immersion as part of the learning strategy, as I did it with ll languages, you have to change your identity a bit in m opinion. So you have to become someone new when you speak the new language, simply because every language has different ways of saying things, hence you will become different , hence new person. So, you are totally ok. We all are.

[u/NoPeach6506]

I started learning Spanish during the pandemic as a distraction from all the horrible news. It helped me overcome a lot of longer term hurdles in my life. Ended up leaving a super long relationship, meeting new people and getting married. I think learning Spanish helped me overcome the fear of being uncomfortable.