Many bilingual couples never choose one shared language at all. Each person speaks their own, and neither switches. It sounds strange from the outside, and it works for a specific reason: you get the most authentic version of each partner instead of a compromised version of both.
Arturo De León Gómez, Spanish Fluency Coach at Speak Better Spanish, and Hannah Pinkerton, Founder of Speak Better Spanish, have done exactly this for years. He speaks Spanish to her. She speaks English to him. As Arturo describes the moment they realised it: “la Real Hannah es la Real Hannah hablando inglés y el Real Arturo es el Real Arturo hablando español.”
Neither of them planned it. Here is how it happened, what it takes to make it work, and what it quietly reveals about language and personality.
Key Takeaways
• Many bilingual couples settle into each partner speaking their own language rather than picking one.
• It only works when both people genuinely understand the other language at an advanced level.
• People often have a slightly different personality in each language, driven by fluency rather than by identity.
• Humor is the last thing to develop in a second language, because it runs on nuance.
• Even tone and pitch of voice can shift between a person’s two languages.
How do bilingual couples end up each speaking a different language?
Usually by drift, not by decision.
“Cuando recién nos conocimos, como que no definíamos muy bien en qué idioma hablar,” Arturo says. Sometimes Spanish, sometimes English. With a Spanish-speaking group, Spanish. With an English-speaking group, English. It moved around.
What changed it was not a conversation about logistics. It was both of them noticing the same thing independently: “tenemos distintas personalidades dependiendo el idioma en el que hablemos.”
Once that is visible, the arrangement makes itself. He understands everything she says in English. She understands everything he says in Spanish. Each of them gets to be the fuller version of themselves, at the same time, in the same conversation.
They still adapt in groups, defaulting to whatever language the room is using. But at home, each stays in their own.
Why does this only work for some bilingual couples?
Because it depends completely on both people having a genuinely advanced command of the other’s language. Not conversational. Advanced.
If one partner is still translating in their head, this arrangement stops being intimacy and becomes an endurance test. They will catch the words and lose the tone, the teasing, and the half-sentence that carried the actual meaning.
The Common European Framework level descriptions are a useful gut check here. Understanding a partner’s unscripted, fast, idiomatic speech across every mood is a C1 kind of task, not a B1 one.
So the honest test is not “can we communicate?” It is “can I follow this person when they are tired, joking, upset, or talking to their mother?”
If you are not sure where you actually sit, a free Spanish Roadmap Session is a 30-minute conversation that will tell you, and tell you what to work on next.
Why do people have a different personality in each language?
This is the part that surprises people, and Arturo’s explanation is refreshingly unmystical. It is not that you have two souls. It is that you have two vocabularies.
“La personalidad se basa en tu fluidez, en el vocabulario que tienes,” he says. Your humor, your references, your asides, all of it is built out of the words you can reach for quickly. Give someone a smaller set of words and a slower reach, and a different person comes out. Not a worse one. A narrower one.
He noticed it in himself long before it came up in the relationship: “hay un Arturo en inglés y hay un Arturo en español.” Much of his mother’s family lives in the United States, so English has been in his life for decades.
Your core does not change. What you care about, who you are, what you have lived through, all of that stays put. What changes is how much of it makes it out of your mouth.
Why is humor the last thing to arrive?
Because humor is almost pure nuance, and nuance is the last thing a language gives you.
Mexican Spanish leans heavily on exaggeration and teasing, which is precisely the register that arrives last. Arturo calls the ceiling fan in the living room el helicóptero. Nobody thinks there is a helicopter in the living room. It is an exaggeration that says the fan is big, powerful and loud, and it is funnier in Spanish than any translation of it is in English.
That is why comprehension can feel finished while humor still feels locked. You can understand every word of a joke and still not find it funny, because the funny part lives in what was not said.
If exaggeration as a habit is new to you, our guide to Mexican relationship culture covers more of where it shows up.
Can your tone of voice really change between languages?
Yes, and it is the detail that convinces people who think the personality thing is imagined.
“Incluso nuestro tono, nuestro timbre de voz es distinto cuando lo hablas en otro idioma,” Arturo says. “Mi timbre de voz en inglés es distinto. El tuyo en español es distinto.” Not the volume. The placement of the voice.
It is not a Spanish and English phenomenon either. Hannah describes a friend from Egypt whose Arabic is deep, loud and commanding, and whose English sounds, in her words, “like a teddy bear.” Same person. Same day. Different voice.
Culture and language are not separable
This is why the personality shift is not a quirk. It is structural.
The way a person expresses themselves in Spanish is built out of the culture that surrounds the language: the warmth, the social closeness, the exaggeration, the teasing. Those are not decorations on top of vocabulary. They are what the vocabulary is for.
Learn the words without the culture and you get someone who is technically correct and socially invisible. Our guide to Mexican greeting etiquette is a good example of how much of the meaning sits outside the dictionary, and what “ahorita” really means is the clearest case of a word whose translation actively misleads you.
What this means if you are learning Spanish
Three things worth taking from all of this.
1. Aim past comprehension. Understanding the words is the beginning. The goal is following the joke, the tone shift and the exaggeration.
2. Expect your Spanish self to feel smaller at first. That is a vocabulary gap, not a personality defect, and it closes.
3. Get your hours in with real speech. Not slowed-down audio. Real speed, real teasing, real interruptions.
Arturo teaches our small-group conversation classes, which are built around exactly that kind of unscripted practice. You can also read more about Arturo’s background.
Frequently Asked Questions
Many do, especially when one partner is much stronger. But plenty of bilingual couples never pick one at all, and each partner speaks their own language. It works when both people understand the other language at an advanced level.
Not between people who have agreed to it. Within a couple it usually feels natural rather than rude. In a group, most bilingual couples switch to whatever language the group is using.
Your core stays the same. What changes is how much of it you can express. Personality in a language rides on fluency and vocabulary, so a smaller vocabulary produces a narrower version of you rather than a different person.
Because it depends on nuance, references, exaggeration and timing, which are the last things to develop. You can understand every word of a joke and still miss why it is funny.
Often, yes. Tone, pitch and the placement of the voice can all shift between a person’s two languages, which speakers of two languages usually recognise immediately once it is pointed out.
Realistically an advanced level, around C1. You need to follow fast, idiomatic, unscripted speech across every mood, not just clear conversation about familiar topics.
Conclusion
Two people, two languages, no switching, and more of both people in the room. That is the whole idea, and it only works on top of real comprehension.
The useful takeaway for a learner is not the arrangement itself. It is what the arrangement depends on: enough language that your full personality survives the trip into Spanish. That is a higher bar than being understood, and it is a much better goal.
If you want to know how far you are from it, book a free Spanish Roadmap Session and we will map out what to work on first.
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Listen to the Podcast
Word-for-word transcript of the conversation, lightly cleaned. The speakers are Hannah Pinkerton and Arturo De León Gómez.
Welcome back to everyone and thank you for joining us. We’re here with Arturo. He is one of our Spanish language fluency coaches here at Speak Better Spanish. He is a native speaker from Mexico, Northern Mexico, and actually has an extensive background in teaching, probably 20 plus years of teaching, wouldn’t you say? Long time, long time. So we’re breaking down some of the cultural and language things behind interactions in Spanish.
And one word, one thing we’re going to be talking about today is, what is it? Okay. The topic is how bilingual couples create their own communication style. So, well, actually, let’s have you tell the story. So when we, when we met, I’ll set the scene. When we met, I only spoke to Arturo in Spanish. Tell us a little bit more, Arturo, about how our, tell the audience a little bit more about why, how we normally communicate who speaks what language and why, and in what situations that might change.
And yeah, tell, tell the audience a little bit about how all of that developed as we started dating. Sí, cuando recién nos conocimos, como que no definíamos muy bien en qué idioma hablar. Entonces, a veces hablábamos español, a veces hablábamos inglés. Si estábamos con un grupo que hablaba español, pues hablábamos español. Si estábamos con un grupo que hablaba inglés, hablábamos inglés. Pero conforme fue pasando el tiempo, quienes hablen más de un idioma sabrán que, tal vez se llega raro esto que voy a decir, pero que tenemos distintas personalidades dependiendo el idioma en el que hablemos.
Y creo que es muy sencillo porque, pues, la personalidad se basa en tu fluidez, en el vocabulario que tienes, porque de ahí vas tomando para, pues, tal vez tu sentido del humor, tal vez para, etcétera, ¿no? Entonces, como que nos empezamos a dar cuenta, sin pensarlo, que tal vez mi personalidad en inglés era diferente a mi personalidad en español y con Hannah lo mismo. No, su personalidad en inglés era distinta a su personalidad en español.
Entonces, muy natural, se fue dando que ella hablaba inglés y yo hablaba español porque, pues, bueno, yo entendía perfectamente lo que ella me decía y entiende perfectamente lo que yo le digo en otro idioma. Y nos dimos cuenta que la Real Hannah es la Real Hannah hablando inglés y el Real Arturo es el Real Arturo hablando español y, pues, bueno, así lo hemos hecho y así lo hemos decidido. Vuelvo a lo mismo porque, pues, yo entiendo perfectamente todo lo que ella me habla en inglés porque, pues, yo hablo inglés y ella entiende todo lo que yo digo en español porque ella habla español, pero seguimos teniendo cada uno, pues, como nuestra personalidad.
No significa que haya ocasiones en las que terminemos hablando idioma o terminemos hablando el otro o dependiendo, como lo dije hace unos momentos, dependiendo el grupo con el que estemos, pues, nos adaptamos y hablamos de un idioma u otro idioma. Más o menos por ahí. Interesting. And I guess we’re fortunate in that we both have a strong understanding and command of the other’s language. It would be different if, for example, if I barely spoke Spanish and you barely spoke English and you mostly spoke Spanish and I mostly spoke English, well, things would be totally different because we wouldn’t be understanding each other on the same level.
But fortunately, it just so happened to work out that we both have a pretty advanced understanding of the other language and the culture. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we understand 100% of what the other person says. There’s always going to be expressions and humor and cultural references and just certain things that no matter how much you’ve lived or experienced or know of a language or have lived in a certain country that speaks that language, you’re just never going to know everything.
I’m not going to know the childhood songs that Arturo grew up with, even though I’ve been living in Mexico for years. And he might not necessarily know some pop culture references that I grew up with on the TV when I was a kid or things like that. So we’re very fortunate that it so happened to work out this way. But Arturo, how did you decide or how did you figure out that the real me, that’s the most authentic version of myself as the English speaker?
Yo me di cuenta desde hace mucho, incluso antes de tener una relación contigo. Para quienes no sepan en este canal, yo hace muchos años estaba por ahí en la universidad. Viví un año en Estados Unidos en un programa tal cual de au pair, o sea, de ir a cuidar niños mientras estudiabas. Y allá, pues bueno, mi comunidad de amigos eran de esta misma, de esta misma empresa que eran amigos y amigas de otros países, ¿no? De tanto latinos como Argentina, Colombia, pero también de otros destinos como Alemania, como Suiza, Francia, etc.
Entonces el idioma, pues bueno, mi personalidad era el idioma, yo no era el real yo, obviamente me comunicaba, etc. Pero yo desde hace muchos años me di cuenta que como que uno tiene, no doble personalidad, sino tal vez herramientas distintas, si eres, tu humor es distinto, tu tipo de bromas es distinta, tú, etc. Que no significa que sea mejor o peor, pero respondiendo a tu pregunta, sí, yo me di cuenta de eso hace mucho tiempo.
También por cuestiones familiares, gran parte de la familia de mi mamá no viven en México, viven en distintos lugares de Estados Unidos. Entonces el idioma inglés, pues ha sido, ha estado muy en mi vida desde, desde hace muchos años. Y, pues bueno, desde ahí yo identifiqué que, pues hay un Arturo en inglés y hay un Arturo en español, ¿no? Muy interesante. Y, pues bueno, yo diría que la misma es true para mí. Y, pues bueno, creo que parte de eso es que la cultura y lenguaje son muy entiendes, que es muy difícil de separar uno de los otros.
Entonces, por ejemplo, I speak Spanish, obviamente, and have lived in Mexico, and the way I express myself in Spanish is based on the culture of Mexico, what we’ve been talking about with relationships, the warmth, the social aspect, the humor, the exaggerations, like, that, that are around me in the day to day. That isn’t the same in my English personality, and my English personality, even, I don’t know, maybe my tone of voice changes, I don’t know, just the references and, like, even the way we express ourselves, not only humor, but whether we’re more talkative or more quiet, whether we’re making, like, puns, or, you know, what types of jokes and references we make.
So, yeah, there’s just so much to it that I feel like probably if anyone else speaks more than one language, we’d love to hear from you if you also find this to be true, that maybe there’s certain slightly different versions of yourself depending on what language you’re speaking. Of course, your core is still the same, what’s important to you, who you are, the experiences you’ve lived, and so on. But depending on, like, how people express themselves in the language and how advanced your command of that language and culture is, will affect.
And I think one of the last things to develop when we learn a language is humor, because there’s just so much nuance to it. It’s just, there’s so much possible depth and ways it can go, even, I mean, as you guys can see from these videos, like, there’s so much exaggeration and teasing as part of the Spanish speaking and specifically the Mexican culture. Like, even just as a side note before we finish, what do you call the fan that’s in my living room?
El helicóptero. Arturo, what do you call the fan that’s, aha, el helicóptero, aha. Obviously, you’re not saying that there’s a helicopter in my living room. It’s an exaggeration to say it’s a big and powerful and maybe even noisy fan that moves a lot of air. Correcto. There’s just lots of little nuances to things. And the deeper you dig into learning a language, the more you can express yourself in that way. And you have those different sides of your personality.
You can connect with other people who speak that language that you encounter in that way as well. So it’s very cool. Any final thoughts on this topic, Arturo? I know we kind of hit, we hit a bunch of different things, but any other thoughts or comments you want to leave the audience thinking about? No, nada más que ahorita dijiste, y estoy de acuerdo con eso, que incluso nuestro tono, nuestro timbre de voz es distinto cuando lo hablas en otro idioma.
Mi timbre de voz en inglés es distinto. El tuyo en español es distinto. Hablo del tono, de la posición de la voz. That’s true. And speaking of that, that reminds me, I have a friend from Egypt. When I hear him speaking Arabic, his voice is very deep and it’s very like, it’s a loud and deep and kind of like a commanding type of voice. But when he speaks in English, he sounds like a teddy bear. He sounds just soft and gentle and caring.
And I think it’s a reflection of like the language, the culture. There’s many factors, but it’s interesting to see not only in Spanish, this plays out in other languages as well. Yeah. Very interesting. Awesome. Well, thank you, Arturo. We’ve shared a lot of insights and a lot of our own lived experiences with the audience. So if anyone has questions or comments, you can drop them below and we’ll see you guys in the next video.
Bye. See you. Bye.
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