Multiple Personalities

I understood something anew about multiple personalities last night. As a professor in the mental health field, it is incumbent upon me to pass along what I learned.
Bilingual people have more than one personality. Now perhaps I am slow, but it dawned on me in a new way last night that people can portray themselves one way in one language, and another way in a different language. My husband's first language is English. I know him as someone who speaks to me without an accent and who responds to me in English. But when he speaks Spanish--which he learned in another country at his parents' insistence--people howl with laughter and respond to him in a completely different way.
I watched this metamorphosis last night. His more serious English-speaking personality was out grilling salmon on the patio when our Spanish-speaking guests arrived. The man of the family quickly joined Sam on the patio and they immediately began chuckling about something or another. It continued until they came in carrying platters of steaming salmon.
Meanwhile, my sister and I conversed in broken Spanish-English with the women in the family. I was a bit distracted, as I had a mishap with the drink out in the garage, then again in the kitchen (we have been finding sticky pink patches in cutlery drawers, under the edge of the dishwasher, and frozen patches of it in the garage--what a mess!)
As Sam began interacting with our guests, I watched and listened carefully. He became someone else, and I loved being able to see this.
It is clear from hearing Sam speak Spanish that his phrasing is rather halting and imperfect. But his pronounciation is excellent and he doesn't let the choppiness of his speech bother him. He listened carefully to the women speak and responded with comments that made them all laugh. They all looked at him with unveiled admiration. He challenged the four-year old to finish her meal so she could have dessert and then followed up with admonishment that sent the family into gales of laughter. Even the serious father. As they left, his typical hugs and kisses were somehow different and warmer.
In English, Sam's humor is usually rather corny and based on literalism of speech. He gets a lot of sympathy laughs, the way I see it. But in Spanish, he is hilarious. I've observed his interactions with Hispanic people several times and come back to this hypothesis each time.
It reminds me of conversations I've struggled through with my spotty German language skills. My German friends have called me serious, ponderous, and associate my conversation contributions as being rather "Catholic" in quality. From what I can gather, that means melancholy, conservative, fixated on right and wrong, and somehow pious. Although I am somewhat melancholy at times, the other qualities don't ring true to me. Yet there they are, as soon as I start to articulate myself in German.
Italian is quite another story. Catholic or no, I come across as extremely sensuous and suggestive in that language. There is something about that language and the way I use the little of it that I know, that creates some sort of languid reclining personality in me. (It is a time when I wish more of an Italian dolorosa-type quality could be part of the mix).
So I began to think about these things last night, watching my husband's body language, hearing his voice, and seeing him make facial expressions--all that look somewhat familiar but not at all what I am used to. Who is this that I married? Whom did he marry? I guess it all depends on what language we are speaking at the time.