You have probably noticed it without knowing quite what to call it. In your native language, you are warmer. Louder, maybe. More likely to say exactly what you mean, with the particular directness your mother tongue carries in its bones. You laugh differently. You argue differently. The words come from somewhere deeper, and they carry something with them that their English translations never quite manage to hold.
Then you switch to English, and something shifts. You become more measured, more careful, more aware of how you are landing. More professional, perhaps, or more polished. Some women say they feel more distant from themselves in English. Others notice they are quieter, less funny, less like the person their family knows them to be.
This is not your imagination. It is not a sign that you have a fragmented identity, or that something is wrong with you. It is one of the most documented phenomena in bilingual psychology, and understanding it has implications that extend well beyond language into the territory of who you are, how you carry yourself across cultures, and what it costs to live between two of them.
The Science of the Bilingual Self
The research on language and identity in bilingual speakers is both robust and, for many immigrant women, immediately recognisable.
A landmark series of studies found that bilingual individuals shift their personality when language is used as a prime, and that they change their expressed personality in accordance with the cultural norms associated with each language (Ross et al., cited in Frontiers, 2017). When you switch languages, you do not simply swap vocabulary. You activate a different cultural self-schema, a different framework for understanding who you are, how you relate to others, and what is appropriate to express.
Research has demonstrated that bilingual individuals experience a kind of “double personality,” which allows them to shift their self-schemas when they are primed with different language modes. In a study of Mexican-American bilinguals living in the United States, participants described themselves differently in English and Spanish, with their heritage cultural self-schemas becoming more salient in their native language, and their host country self-schemas becoming more prominent in English (Frontiers, 2017).
This phenomenon has a name in the research literature: Cultural Frame Switching. When bilinguals change from one language to another, they undergo a cultural frame switch, activating the perceived cultural norms and behavioural patterns most associated with that language. The switch is not deliberate. It happens automatically, at the level of implicit cultural encoding, long before conscious thought.
Research with Spanish-English bilingual adults found that participants reported higher extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness in English compared to Spanish, while exhibiting higher neuroticism in Spanish. These are not small or superficial differences. They are measurable shifts in core personality dimensions, triggered simply by the language someone is speaking at a given moment. Similar patterns have been documented across Chinese-English, Arabic-English, and Hungarian-Romanian bilinguals, suggesting this is not a cultural quirk specific to any one group, but a fundamental feature of what it means to inhabit more than one language (Tandfonline, 2024; Academia, 2023).
Why This Happens: Language as Cultural Container
To understand why language shifts the sense of self so significantly, it helps to understand what language actually carries beyond its communicative function.
Language is not a neutral vessel for meaning. Every language is a cultural artefact: it encodes the values, relational patterns, emotional registers, and ways of structuring reality that belong to the culture in which it developed. When you learned your mother tongue as a child, you were not simply acquiring words. You were absorbing a whole way of being in the world, a relational style, a set of emotional permissions, a sense of what can be expressed and how, and by whom.
This is why the experience of speaking your first language is so qualitatively different from speaking your second, even decades after becoming fluent in the latter. The intensity of involvement in a language learned before puberty is argued to be much stronger than the connection an individual creates with a language acquired after the age of self and identity formation. Your native tongue is not just the language you learned first. It is the language in which you first became yourself.
Research examining the early work of psycholinguist Susan Ervin-Tripp illustrates this vividly. When Japanese-American women were asked to complete sentences in both Japanese and English, they proposed strikingly different endings depending on the language used. The sentence “When my wishes conflict with my family” received a Japanese ending that tended toward difficulty and familial priority, while the English ending was more individualistic and self-directed (Psychology Today, 2011). Same person. Same sentence. Two completely different selves responding.
The Particular Experience of Immigrant Women
While the bilingual self-shift is documented across many populations, immigrant women carry a specific version of it that is worth naming directly.
For most immigrant women, the switch to English is not simply a linguistic act. It is a social one, shaped by the particular pressures of navigating professional contexts, institutional systems, and majority-culture relationships in a country that was not built around your way of being. The English you speak in Melbourne, or Sydney, or any anglophone city, was calibrated over years of subtle feedback: what lands and what does not, what sounds too direct or too warm or too much, what you learned to soften or hold back in order to be legible to the people around you.
That calibration has a cost. The version of yourself that emerged from it is functional and capable. She is also, in some ways, a translation. And as anyone who has spent time translating knows, something always gets lost.
Early psycholinguistic research by David Luna and colleagues found that Hispanic-American bilingual women interpreted advertisements featuring women differently depending on the language of the session. In Spanish, women in the ads were perceived as more self-sufficient and independent. In English, the same images were read through a more socially embedded, relationally defined lens (Psychology Today, 2011). The same images, the same women, seen through completely different cultural eyes depending on which language was active.
This matters beyond the academic. The woman you see yourself as in your native language and the woman you see yourself as in English may genuinely differ in significant ways. Neither is more real than the other. But only one of them carries your full emotional history, your relational roots, and the particular version of yourself that existed before you had to adapt.
The Cost of Living Between Two Versions of Yourself
The science is illuminating. The lived experience of it, however, carries a weight that the data alone does not fully capture.
For immigrant women navigating daily life across two languages and two cultural frameworks, the shift between selves is not simply interesting or neutral. It is exhausting, and at times, profoundly disorienting.
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with it. The English-speaking version of you is competent, functional, professionally fluent. She gets things done. She navigates the workplace, the healthcare system, the school meetings. But she may not feel entirely like you. She is, in some ways, a performance of you, assembled from the available cultural materials of your adopted country, carefully calibrated to fit contexts that were not built with you in mind.
Meanwhile, the version of you that exists in your native language, the one who laughs from her belly and speaks without so much editing, the one who knows how to be held and how to hold, the one who belongs somewhere, may be increasingly confined to specific contexts. The phone call home. The voice message in the middle of the night. The quiet of your own thoughts.
Acculturation stress, stemming from the challenges of cultural adaptation, can result in a shifting or fragmented sense of self, leading migrants to question their identity or feel disconnected from both cultures. This fragmentation is not imagined and is not weakness. It is the predictable psychological consequence of living in a context that requires you to be different versions of yourself in different settings, without a space in which all of those versions can coexist.
Integration as the Goal, Not Assimilation
One of the most consistent findings in acculturation research is the difference in psychological outcomes between integration and assimilation. These are not interchangeable concepts, and the distinction matters enormously.
Assimilation means adopting the host culture and releasing the heritage culture. It is the cultural logic of “fitting in” of becoming, as much as possible, indistinguishable from the mainstream. For many immigrant women, there is pressure, internal and external, toward assimilation, toward minimising what marks them as different, toward prioritising the English-speaking, Australian-adapted version of themselves.
The research is clear that this strategy comes at significant psychological cost. Findings indicate that marginalisation, characterised by a lack of engagement with both the host and origin cultures, correlates with the poorest mental health outcomes, including heightened levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. Conversely, integration, where migrants maintain their cultural heritage while also participating in the host culture, is associated with the most favourable psychological health, reflecting lower stress levels and higher life satisfaction.
Integration, by contrast, means holding both. Maintaining connection to your heritage culture and your native language while also building genuine engagement with your adopted country. Bicultural individuals tend to draw social support from both cultures and switch between them depending on context, which buffers stress.
The goal, in other words, is not to choose between your native-language self and your English self. It is to find a way to hold them both, to allow the switching to be fluid and contextually appropriate rather than anxious and fragmenting. Research consistently shows that this integrated approach is associated with significantly better outcomes across mental health, relational wellbeing, and sense of self (Berry, 1997; Benet-Martínez & Haritatos, 2005).
What Gets Lost When There Is No Space to Be Both
For many immigrant women, the practical reality of life in Australia does not naturally offer a space where both selves can coexist. Work demands the English self. Social contexts in a majority-anglophone city tend to demand the English self. Even therapy, in most available settings, demands the English self.
High Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) individuals perceive their cultural backgrounds as harmonious and mutually enriching, leading to greater psychological wellbeing, lower acculturative stress, and enhanced cognitive flexibility. In contrast, low BII is associated with identity conflict, reduced cultural competence, and impaired psychological functioning.
The question, then, is what supports the development of higher Bicultural Identity Integration. Research points to several factors: the presence of community with heritage cultural peers, the maintenance of the mother tongue in meaningful contexts, reduced exposure to discrimination, and access to spaces where the complexity of a bicultural identity is understood and welcomed rather than managed or minimised (MDPI, 2025).
Therapy in your mother tongue, with a culturally attuned psychologist, offers precisely this kind of space. Not a space where you choose between your selves, but one where the complexity of living between them can be seen, named, and worked with. Where your native-language self does not have to wait outside the room. Where the particular emotional texture of your culture of origin is not a cultural footnote but a clinically relevant aspect of who you are.
A Psychoanalytic Note on Multiplicity
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the experience of feeling like different people in different languages maps onto something broader and clinically rich: the multiplicity of the self.
Contemporary relational psychoanalysis has largely moved away from the classical notion of a unified, coherent self toward a more nuanced understanding of the self as multiple, contextual, and relational. The analyst Philip Bromberg described this as the “self states” model: the idea that we are not one self but a collection of selves, each emerging in different relational and contextual conditions (Bromberg, 1998). What matters clinically is not that these states exist, but whether they are integrated, whether they can know each other and communicate across their differences, or whether they are rigidly dissociated and cut off from one another.
For bilingual immigrant women, language itself becomes a container for different self-states. The native-language self and the English self are not equally accessible to each other. The transitions between them can involve a degree of dissociation, a not-quite-feeling-like-yourself that is mild enough to go unnamed but significant enough to contribute to the pervasive emotional exhaustion that many immigrant women describe.
Therapeutic work that creates space for both, that allows the native-language self and the English self to be present and eventually to speak to each other, offers something qualitatively different from what most available services provide.
Towards a More Integrated Self
The feeling of being a different person in English than you are in your native language is not a problem to be fixed. It is not evidence of instability or inconsistency. It is the natural consequence of inhabiting two languages and the two cultural worlds they carry.
What matters is not eliminating the difference, but developing the capacity to hold it without fragmentation. To move between your selves with fluency rather than anxiety. To know that the woman who laughs in her mother tongue and the woman who presents in English are both you, and that neither has to disappear for the other to exist.
The goal is not to resolve your identity into one neat package. It is to develop comfortable bicultural fluency, where you can move between cultural contexts without feeling fragmented or false.
That kind of integration is not something that happens automatically with time. For many women, it requires a space to do the inner work of bringing those selves into relationship with each other. A space where the full complexity of who you are, in all your languages and all your cultural incarnations, can be held, understood, and honoured.
If this resonates with something you have been carrying, I invite you to reach out. At Talking Works Psychology, we we speak the immigrant language with a clinical lens that understands your world from the inside. Click here to book a session at talkingworks.com.au and let’s begin the work of bringing you more fully home to yourself.
References
Benet-Martínez, V., & Haritatos, J. (2005). Bicultural identity integration (BII): Components and psychosocial antecedents. Journal of Personality, 73(4), 1015–1050.
Berry, J. W. (1997). Immigration, acculturation, and adaptation. Applied Psychology, 46(1), 5–34.
Bromberg, P. M. (1998). Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation. Analytic Press.
Chen, X. S., & Bond, M. H. (2010). Two languages, two personalities? Examining language effects on the expression of personality in a bilingual context. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(11), 1514–1528. https://research.polyu.edu.hk/en/publications/two-languages-two-personalities-examining-language-effects-on-the-2/
Frontiers in Psychology. (2017). Hablo inglés y español: Cultural self-schemas as a function of language. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00885/full
Frontiers in Psychology. (2025). The interplay between migration and self-identity: A structured review. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1563508/full
London International Conferences. (2024). Acculturation strategies and their impact on psychological health. https://londonic.uk/js/index.php/plic/article/view/256
MDPI Behavioral Sciences. (2025). Individual factors in acculturation: An overview of key dimensions. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15/6/827
PMC. (2022). Language dominance and cultural identity predict variation in self-reported personality among Hispanic/Latino bilingual adults. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11981866/
Psychology Today. (2011). Change of language, change of personality? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-bilingual/201111/change-language-change-personality
Ramirez-Esparza, N., et al. (2006). Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(2), 99–120. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656604000753
Reachlink. (2026). Acculturative stress: What happens when two cultures collide. https://www.reachlink.com/advice/life-stressors-and-transitions/acculturative-stress/
Tandfonline. (2024). Language dominance and cultural identity predict variation in self-reported personality in English and Spanish among Hispanic/Latino bilingual adults. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223891.2024.2416412
Recent Comments