When American-born Chana married Uri an Israeli she called on her Bais Yaakov Hebrew skills to communicate with him. It worked for them at first. But when she had her first baby she didn’t feel natural cooing and cuddling with her little one in Hebrew. Mentally she couldn’t see herself as “Ima” — she felt more like a “Mommy.” “My in-laws though couldn’t get past referring to me as ‘Ima ’ ” Chana shares. “As my daughter got older and started speaking whenever she’d spend a whole afternoon with them she’d come back saying ‘Ima.’ It irritated me to no end. Who was this ‘Ima’? I felt like she was talking about someone else not me!” Like Chana many bilingual people feel like a different personality when they speak in their second language.Jean-MarcDewaele — a professor in applied linguistics and multilingualism at Birkbeck University in London and a multilingual himself — studied how people feel when switching languages. He asked more than 100 people who speak up to five languages to rate five specific feelings they may have when they switch languages. He combined the data with answers to open-ended questions to paint a complex picture.