Learn a new language, get a new soul
Look up to the title, it’s a Czech proverb. It comes to mind whenever I try to be nice in Macedonian, or angry in English. I sound surprisingly fake in my English-spoken anger, and unsurprisingly disingenuous in my attempts at politeness in Macedonian. It boils down to a relative biculturality I have unwittingly cultivated throughout my life. It is the same for most people who are affected by a cultural world order where most people with any kind of higher education have a maternal (paternal) and national (regional) culture that seems to function in frozen form, as a golden age type theme to be reincarnated during a myriad of scattered annual rituals commemorating events of a self-reinforcing mythology of semi-historiographic, supposedly axiomatic, revelations to be gulped up in one take and with no doubt. A global culture offers a second world view, usually a lot more hopeful in nature, and with a great dose of upward mobility as a part of its ideology. Today, that is the UN-backed NATO-reinforced world where an individual can flourish in his or her own excellence, all you need to do is apply. Of course, this world is full of hypocrisy and mismanagement and so on, but it is a way out of an individual’s insular domestic culture that reinforces self-sacrifice at the expense of self-actualization.
That’s where the second language becomes not just a window into whatever those foreigners are talking about, but a door into a culture that can offer salvation from the daily mire of one’s own backyard. And so, the kind of language you use while learning to speak a language becomes the kind of behavior you exhibit while functioning in that new language.
It basically functions like being on a spectrum, where one side is one language and culture, and on the other side of the spectrum is another. Sooner or later, depending on life choices (spousal, residential, professional), you will be pushed further along on the spectrum in one direction. But it won’t make a bicultural person monocultural again. Circumstances will dictate nuances, but not incredible changes in that respect. It is a blessing and a curse to forever be in cultural purgatory, never fully belonging in either environment. The only people you will be able to belong with will be other biculturals (or internationals, as they seem to self-identify).
