When you and your partner don’t share a first-language, communication issues can become even more difficult to navigate. Tiago Ventura and Ioná Corrêa Barroso consult the experts to discover whether true love can make it over a language barrier

Have you ever been lost for words at a crucial point in an argument? Has a partner ever mistaken your joke for a serious comment? The challenge of trying to express yourself clearly in a relationship is something everyone can relate to – but imagine doing this in a language other than your mother tongue. 

The complexity of navigating relationships with people who speak different languages is often overlooked. A survey published by Multilingual Minds found that 65 per cent of multilingual people felt like “a different person” when speaking in their learned languages, while studies have shown that native languages, which are acquired from family and friends, are infused with emotion. Naturally, people feel more connected to their mother tongue. 

Jean-Marc Dewaele, a professor of Applied Linguistics and Psychology at UCL, explores how language shapes the way you convey emotion. “Identity is framed through language and culture,” he says. “If partners have very different ways of expressing emotions, it can lead to tension.” This is because, when people learn a new language, the way in which they articulate themselves in their mother tongue may not translate into their second language.

According to Dewaele, languages learned later in life “typically have lower emotional resonance because they have been learnt in classrooms using different memory systems”. This is why, when it comes to expressing emotions, people find that words of affection tend “to be most powerful in the languages they have been socialised in. In other words, languages they grew up [speaking].”

This is something that 29-year-old Brazilian Karoline Costa, who is fluent in Portuguese and in English, understands. “There were times when I thought I was two separate people – one in each language,” she says. 

If I keep having relationships with people who don’t speak my language, will they ever get to experience me as my most genuine self?

Costa relocated six years ago and now lives in Amsterdam. Her dating life is far from dull – she went on 10 first dates last year –  but it has been made complicated by language barriers. 

A Dutch man Costa met on a dating app ended things with her after three dates because he did not feel comfortable expressing himself in English, despite enjoying the time they spent together. This was a feeling that Costa understood to a certain degree herself.

“I’ve been on a date with one Brazilian guy since I left Brazil,” she says. “And I really felt a difference, especially when it comes to sharing jokes.” Having a sense of humour is particularly important to Costa. She admits that her “entire personality is based on being funny,” and after a date told her she was “much funnier” in Portuguese than in English, all sorts of concerns appeared in her mind. 

“If I keep having relationships with people who don’t speak my language, will they ever get to experience me as my most genuine self?” she wondered. “I feel like if someone doesn’t speak Portuguese, there is a part of me they just won’t be able to reach.”

We’re all socialised into different ways of talking. Things like how direct, or indirect you are, are often quite linked with cultural and language background 

In a continuously globalised world, where 4.1 million people in the UK alone have English as their second language, it is likely that these relationships will continue to become more common. Dr Helen Spencer-Oatey, an Applied Linguistics professor at the University of Warwick, believes we need to “raise people’s awareness” of this phenomenon.

Spencer-Oatey explains that we need to understand the nuance of these relationships. “You shouldn’t just see it in terms of native language,” she says. “We’re all socialised into different ways of talking. Things like how direct, or indirect you are, are often quite linked with cultural and language background.” 

She adds that these behaviours reach all areas of relationships: “Ways of apologising, complementing, ways of responding to compliments, there’s a lot of differences across languages. If you handle them differently you run the risk of the other person being offended.” 

Getting lost in translation every now and again seems to be unavoidable in a multilingual relationship, but Dewaele remains adamant that people shouldn’t be afraid to enter one. Just “be aware that there are obstacles ahead,” he says. Seeing as that is the case with most things in life, at least this could be a good excuse to build an impressive Duolingo streak.