How Language and Culture Shape Different Versions of You
A polyglot’s quest for the integration of their many identities
As I was sitting in my Toronto apartment, having just turned twenty-seven, close to celebrating my one-year anniversary of moving to Canada, a classical tune on my Spotify playlist threw me into a nostalgic reminiscence of years gone by: my late teenage years in Western Europe, my many visits to Russia in my early twenties, a version of me that now felt distant, faded by time, geographical distance, and cultural distance. A version of me that had been irreversibly altered by the many years I have spent in North America, gradually discovering a new me and embracing a completely different culture and lifestyle which, in turn, seemed to have forged a new me.
Each of my long-term stays in different countries was marked by the primary use of that country’s official language in my day-to-day life, meaning, respectively: Italian, Russian, and English. Thus, along with the cultural divide, there was also a linguistic divide taking place in my mind.
Charlemagne is famously quoted as saying that to have a second language is to have a second soul, and in recent years it has been argued that polyglots often seem to “switch” personalities when they switch between languages, a phenomenon usually referred to…
