We change personalities when we change cultures. So science now confirms what experience has long told us.

A recent study looked at how bicultural (defined as participating in two cultures, as opposed to merely being able to speak a second language) Hispanic women in the US displayed shifts in personality when their language context changed.

Reuters’ summary of the research, by David Luna, Torsten Ringberg and Laura A. Peracchio, and published in the Journal of Consumer Research, explains that the women watched ads, six months apart. The first session was either in English or Spanish, and six months later the same ads were dubbed into the other language.

The women tended to view the video subjects as more self-sufficient in Spanish, and more lonely in English.

Anyone who has lived overseas long enough will recognize the pattern: we have different experiences in our different languages, and these experiences combine to shape how we respond to our contexts. Put simply, we become different people as we float between languages.

As a person with a Swiss-German side to me, I think that I am more musical—more likely to sing, or whistle—while thinking in Swiss-German. Conversely, I am more extroverted in English.

All this is to recommend language learning. It hardly matters what language: the process can reshape our capacity to understand what it means to be human.