Culture

Roger Federer is a frame-shifter — as am I.

Roger Federer is a frame-shifter — as am I.

Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn’t even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.
Roger Federer

Tennis great Roger Federer recently called it quits on a storied career after 24 years on the tour.

While I could go on and on about his out-of-this-world skills on the court, I want to focus on an off-court quality that is equally impressive: Federer is quadrilingual; that is, he speaks four languages fluently.

It is not uncommon for him to do 2-3 hours of press after every match, switching from one language to the next, until he fulfills all his media obligations. The opening quote above was from an interview about his interviews at the U.S. Open 10 years ago.

For anyone who speaks more than one language, Federer’s experience is a pretty common phenomenon.

Karsten Moran / The New York Times

Frame-Shifting

Some researchers call it “frame-shifting,” which really makes this phenomenon sound like a superpower.

While the relationship between language and thought is complicated—after all, language is closely intertwined with culture and the nuances that come with it—I really believe that it can greatly influence the way multilinguals act and perceive the world.

One of my close friends is fluent in both Korean and English, and I can tell a shift in her behavior when she speaks Korean despite not knowing the language myself.

When conversing in English, my friend is outgoing and direct, regardless of the gender of her conversation partner. In Korean, though, she becomes more deferential around men and restrained in general.

I asked her about this, and she admits that the change is almost subconscious. It’s as if speaking Korean is a cue for her to adhere to the Confucian principles so espoused by many East Asian cultures.

Curse of the Number Four

I, too, find myself thinking and acting a bit differently depending on the language I’m using. The pitch in my voice actually increases when I speak Chinese.

I suspect that since I learned the language as a child but didn’t get to use it much as an adult, I now associate it with being a little girl and speaking in a more childlike tone.

In addition, I notice that I come up with different opinions about the same things depending on which language is used to analyze the information.

For example, the number four is homophonous with the word “death” in Chinese so people in the Chinese-speaking world find ways to avoid it at all costs. They’d pay extra to not have the number in their street address or on their license plates. Or they’d rename the fourth floor of a building to the fifth floor.

Thomas Tucker / Unsplash Whenever I return to Taipei, I feel like a different part of me comes alive.

When I travel to Taiwan, I become much more sensitive to and conscious of this superstition, shunning things associated with the number.

When I’m elsewhere and not speaking Chinese, though, I don’t see the number four in the same ominous light.

Plenty of research backs up Federer’s perspective and other anecdotal experiences.

Language and Impressions

In a study conducted by a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Parisian adults fluent in French and Portuguese reported that they acted differently when speaking one language or the other.

The professor asked one of the subjects, Isabel, to recount an experience she had in Portugal, in both Portuguese and French, where she was trying to access a postal service bank account without her ID.

The two tellings actually came out quite differently. The events and characters were the same in both scenarios, but when Isabel spoke in Portuguese, she came across as well-mannered and polite while the French rendition made her seem angrier and more critical.

Perceptions of Time

Icons8 Team / Unsplash

Another study by researchers at Lancaster University in the UK found that Spanish-Swedish bilinguals also perceive time differently depending on which language they used.

When asked to estimate time in Spanish, the bilingual subjects based their estimates on volume with respect to a container being filled because that’s how time is quantified in Spanish.

When asked to do the same in Swedish, the subjects instead gave time estimates in distance, which is how Swedish speakers see time.

Multilingual Worldview

To monolinguals, this might seem an inconvenience or even a little bit crazy. I can assure them that it is neither (though multilinguals do sometimes slip up).

For one, the switch happens effortlessly; it isn’t something that multilinguals have to prepare for or work hard to do. It just kind of happens.

More importantly, as Federer alluded to in his interview, being multilingual allows us to understand and know ourselves better. We might have thoughts that we didn’t know we had until we spoke in a different language.

Also, multilinguals tend to be more open-minded and adaptable to new situations since we already see the world from more than one angle.

The First Step to Becoming a Frame-Shifter

While it’s unlikely any of us can ever learn to play tennis like Federer, we all have the capacity to acquire his other awesome skill: frame-shifting.

There are plenty of resources out there to help us learn a new language.

MOOCs (massive open online courses) such as Coursera and edX offer many free or affordable language classes of all levels. There are also apps like Duolingo and Memrise.

You can also take classes at your local community college or find a native speaker to tutor you.

It might take time before you run into the fascinating experience of frame-switching, but if you keep at it, you, too, can have this superpower!

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