The doorbell sounds. Valentina leaps up, greeting her ex-boyfriend at the door. They shuffle into her room to study together. Her cheeks are airbrushing crimson, and she laughs too hard at his tragic joke.

“Ho visto porn iniziare cosi,” I snicker to my other Italian roommates, Matteo and Enrico, in the kitchen. It was one of the crude Italian phrases, translating to “I have seen porn start like this”, that Valentina had, incidentally, taught me yesterday. She had rattled off cliché examples of when to deploy it: “Think shacking up with the pizza delivery driver or flirting with your local barista.”

Matteo, collapsing his chin to stomach, erupts into a laugh that ricochets through our weathered Trento apartment.

“Ahh brava Claudia,” he remarks, proud that I’ve seized their slang.

When speaking Italian, quick wit cascades through me like an unbridled stream; in English, it’s dammed.

It turns out I’m not an anomaly; more than half of 1000 multilinguals in a study by Ukrainian-American linguist Aneta Pavlenko said they felt like a different person when speaking another language. Pavlenko identifies this phenomenon as linguistically unique and psychological. But bilinguals who find their personality to grow or shrink as they switch between languages say this experience is both liberating and confronting.

***

Pedro Barros never arrives quietly. If it’s not his unconscious humming to Brazilian pop leaking from his wire earphones or his staccato laugh that announces him, it’s the clacking of his leather cowboy boots and the clattering of keys hung from his jeans.

Nobody would ever accuse Pedro of being shy. But as a child, his words didn’t travel further than his front door. Pedro had exchanged his native tongue, Brazilian Portuguese, for the unpalatable cadence of European Portuguese when he moved to Lisbon from Brazil, and his loquaciousness diminished in the transition. With time, his flamboyant self migrated into his new spoken language, but Pedro still finds himself snappiest in Brazilian Portuguese. These aren’t Pedro’s innate qualities, but the outcome of having flicked through his native repertoire, only to find missing pages.

“It’s weird,” Pedro reflects, yet many applied linguists say it’s difficult to express emotional nuance when one isn’t fluent. Guilt follows his confession. Pedro says he feels like he’s “being shady” to European Portuguese by taking sides, by blaming his adopted tongue for his temperament.

Bilingualism can feel violent and self-dividing; a mirror in which you don’t recognise the person staring back, feeling guilt as if linguistically and ethnically disloyal. Researcher Pavlenko, in her ‘Biligual Selves’ study, observes that bilinguals in the 20th century were thought to experience an “inner split”, with their political allegiances presumed to align with those of their native tongue. Migrants were forced to forget their first language for this perceived disloyalty. French-Spanish writer Claude Esteban describes it as “overcom[ing] a strange laceration, a gap not merely between two languages but also between the mental universes carried by them; I could never make them coincide within myself”.

As if to make amends, Pedro adds and adopts a tender tone.

“In Brazilian Portuguese, I feel way more affectionate towards other people,” he says. “It’s really a love language for me because it’s a language that was nurtured only by the love of my mum and my sister.”

Pedro’s languages are the clothing in his closet. Each item speaks to a different style, each draws out parts of his personality that may otherwise stay folded away. Brazilian Portuguese is his soft leather jacket, bringing him closer to his femininity and affectionate self.

In intimate moments with his ex-lover, Pedro was magnetised to his native language: “I had this urge to express myself with Brazilian Portuguese,” he says. “Then I had to explain to him what I was saying, but it came out of me instinctively.”

European Portuguese, on the other hand, is like buttoning up a blazer that is a size too small, tailored and lined with a rich vocabulary, but undeniably constrictive. It’s an oxymoron of a language, academically articulate but suppressed. If Pedro’s Brazilian Portuguese vocabulary bleeds into conversation, people ask him why he is speaking that way.

“I had to learn from early on how to master the European accent,” Pedro says, “because I didn’t feel like it was a safe place to navigate my Brazilian self.”

Pavlenko says anxieties over a lack of social acceptance of bilingualism inform “linguistic schizophrenia,” a metaphor capturing bilinguals’ “border-crossing” and identity-dividing experience. Pedro agrees.

“Even though this is something people don’t do on purpose, I really see them as microaggressions and they add to my trauma associated with the language,” he says. But Pedro wasn’t traumatised by the process of learning English, and without this psychological barrier, his expression is fearless and forthright.

English is his eccentric bag, made from a burgundy Moroccan rug, slung over his shoulder and worn with confidence. But Pedro’s wardrobe isn’t compartmentalised, and neither are multilinguals’; each language influences the other.

***

Olga Maxwell, hooking strands of her ash-blonde hair behind her ear, reaches for the home phone.

It’s her Ukrainian mother, who, after greeting formalities, doesn’t hesitate to remind Olga that her intonation and melody are off, or rather “very English”. While her mother isn’t impressed, Olga admits “quite often I bring English intonation because it sounds more like me”.

Olga, a bilingualism and applied lingualism expert, says bilinguals unconsciously mix elements like the intonation of one language with another. Having lived in eastern Ukraine during the Soviet era, Olga grew up bilingual, speaking Ukrainian and Russian, being dominant in the latter. Since moving to Melbourne in 1999, English has become her primary language, not just for assimilation or practicality, but—as she says with a glint in her eyes— “the language of my emotions”.

She is fascinated by the lifespan of her linguistic repertoire, by which she means the collection of her linguistic knowledge and codes used to switch between different situations. Olga’s learned languages are train carriages through which her emotions move over time.

A Ukrainian acquaintance of Olga’s moved to Melbourne a few years ago. When she received a costly household bill, she asked Olga to help her call the company to dispute it. But it became an overwhelming situation that Olga couldn’t bear to translate. “I can’t tell you in Ukrainian,” Olga said to her acquaintance. “I can tell you in English or I can tell you in Russian. I’m too emotional.”

Speaking Ukrainian had sat dormant for too long, and resurrecting it during a difficult moment was painful, like hearing a song that reminds you of a breakup. Many multilinguals, after spending years abroad, can lose complete self-expression in their first language.

“My system has, in a way, restructured and changed, because a lot of my friends here are English speaking,” Olga says. “And that’s probably why English is the language of emotions.”

But with personalities shifting across languages, Olga says we also need to consider the attitudes to languages and their respective cultural norms.

***

With her entrepreneurial spirit, poised stride, and designer wardrobe, it’s hard to imagine Ellie Mooney lacking self-confidence. And yet, when she talks, her stern visage melts like a candle into soft smiles and animated hand gestures. She always has something to say; when a thought strikes, she doesn’t hold it back for a second, even if it means cutting someone off.

Ellie, a native English speaker from Australia, moved to Shanghai, China, to pursue entrepreneurship and teach English. While putting years of academic Chinese studies into practice in China, she also became captivated by her oscillating bilingual self. During her two years living in China, Ellie noticed her personality, when speaking Mandarin, began to mirror its conservative culture, her bold idiosyncrasies diluting in Confucian cultural norms of interaction.

I exchange the very few phrases I know in Mandarin, starting with “Nǐ hǎo, wǒ de míngzi shì Claudia” (Hello, my name is Claudia).

Ellie’s dimples reveal themselves. “Your voice changed,” it became more dulcet, she says. “I’ve noticed it myself, I can come across as completely different in Chinese,” she continues.

Ellie isn’t the only one who has realised that bilinguals can shift expectations and behaviour to those of the respective language—one study found that Chinese speakers observed themselves and their peers to be more “conscientious” and “culturally sophisticated” in Chinese than English.

Ellie recounts her exchange to France in high school, comparing the French curriculum, which included topics and vocabulary of dating and youth culture, to that of Chinese.

She detours from this story, telling me she went on a date last week, but before doing so makes a point that sharing intimate details of one’s dating life with a stranger, to her experience, isn’t common in Chinese culture.

The textbooks are somewhat conservative in China, and there is a strong hierarchy for respect. Her colleagues there told her that the curriculum was structured in a way that encourages passivity. Chinese students have a lot of respect for teachers and education; in Australia, you just get “total brats” in the classroom, she says.

During her time speaking Mandarin in China, Ellie began to embody this ethos.

“I became more quiet and conditioned to listen more and talk less,” Ellie says.

But it wasn’t just cultural norms that influenced her to come across as introverted, it was the linguistic nuances of Mandarin and having an incomplete linguistic repertoire. Unlike English, Mandarin is a tonal language, Ellie explains; words may use the same characters, but the tone changes the meaning completely. Ever the perfectionist, when speaking Mandarin, she hesitates, ensuring she will be tonally correct. Consequently, she says, “My personality was just cut down and cut down.”

Ellie acknowledges this phenomenon and her personal experience aren’t universal, “Is it necessarily a different personality or is it just indicative of who I am at this point in my life and how long I’ve been learning that specific language?” she muses.

She may find the complexity of the tonal language grinds down her personality, but its vocabulary, offering situational words that English lacks, equips her to express the specificity of her emotions. Words like 馋 (chán), which she says has no direct translation, but describes the feeling of being in bed at night and wanting to nibble on something. It doesn’t equate to being hungry or peckish, she reiterates.

***

For Ellie, it’s Mandarin’s vocabulary that grants her most articulate self. For me, it’s prosody that encourages me to be more sarcastic in Italian. Prosody, the focus of Olga’s research—referring to the patterns of stress, melody, and intonation in a language—is theatrical in Italian, with its open vowels, intonation and dramatic pitch contour.

Becoming more animated within these patterns, Olga says, my speech may erupt more fluidly and hence, sarcasm can arise. Many multilinguals, after living abroad, say they can articulate themselves more freely in another language, as if liberated from the taboos associated with their mother tongue.

Speaking Italian, for me, is like slipping into an eccentric fur trim, lime green jacket—a garment that emboldens uninhibited qualities that I may otherwise restrain.

A language that gives me permission to strut.