Multilingual speakers routinely report feeling like a different person in each of their languages: more direct in one, more formal in another, able to say "I love you" in a second language when the first felt too exposed. Aneta Pavlenko's research on bilingual emotion and identity takes this seriously as a real psychological phenomenon, not a metaphor, tracing why a second language can feel like a second self.
IACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies