By Charlotte Li ’28

My friend once told me that she feels sorry for her English-speaking friends. Not out of arrogance, but because they would never get to experience the funniest version of her. That version only exists when she speaks Mandarin.

It was my freshman year, and we were still figuring out who we were in the languages we carried. Her comment stuck with me. What makes someone funnier, warmer, or more themselves in one language than another? Is it the culture baked into the words? The slang you grew up laughing at? Or does the language itself somehow carry how you feel?

I started paying closer attention after that conversation. And what I found in myself surprised me. I become quieter and more grounded in Cantonese. Playful and loose in Mandarin. Careful and structured in English and French, the languages that I learned in the classroom rather than in my everyday life. And yet, when I journal, when I am frustrated, when I want to be truly honest about something, such as expressing love, English flows the best. The language I grew up learning but never felt like I could fully master. The language that somehow became the place I go to tell the truth.

Part of it is cultural familiarity. My friend’s Mandarin humor is not just about the words; it is more about the references, the timing, and the shared understanding of what is funny and why. That kind of humor does not translate because it was never really about the language to begin with. It was about everything the language grew up inside of.

It is also more than culture. The experience of using a language you learned through rules rather than instinct changes how you move through it. When I speak English and French, I slow down and monitor myself, think about how to phrase every sentence before I think about feeling. There is a certain carefulness that comes with a language you learned by rules rather than by instinct. 

Cantonese and Mandarin are both homes, the languages I do not have to think in, where I can play and still sound like myself. The difference between them is subtler. Cantonese sits lower in my body. My voice drops. I speak it less here because fewer people share it with me, so it has become something more private. Mandarin is where I get loud, but I am not sure about the reason. Maybe it’s how often I use it, maybe something in the rhythm. Some things about language live below explanation.

What is strange is that none of this is conscious. I did not decide to be more serious in English or more fun in Mandarin. It just happened from over years of where and how and why I used each language. Which makes me wonder how much of our personality is actually ours, and how much of it belongs to the language we are speaking at the time.

Maybe the language we feel most in is not the one we were born into. Maybe it is the one that was around when we were figuring something out, about ourselves, other people, or what we actually wanted to say. Languages do not just carry words. They carry the version of you that learned them.

So next time you catch yourself switching languages mid-conversation, or reaching for a word that only exists in one of your languages, pay attention. That moment of reaching is showing you where you keep the parts of yourself that are hardest to translate.