What happens to your cultural identity when you become an expat?

You build a new sense of home, often pick up a new language, and adopt habits shaped by your new culture. If your sense of identity feels different since you moved abroad, you're not imagining it: it's one of the most common experiences expats share.

What is cultural identity?

Cultural identity is what makes us who we are and gives us a sense of belonging to particular groups. It touches nearly every part of life, including:

• Place of birth
• Religion
• Language
• Holidays
• Family structures
• Traditions
• Cuisine
• Social behaviors
• Art, literature, and music

...and much more.

Even people who never leave their hometown can hold multiple cultural identities. For example, children of parents from different countries, sometimes called "third culture kids." Cultural identity isn't fixed. It's shaped by where you've lived, who you've spent time with, and how you define yourself, and all of that can shift over time.

What happens to your cultural identity when you move abroad?

Moving somewhere new doesn't erase where you're from. Instead, it adds a layer on top of it. Most expats describe the change as gradual: a mix of embracing parts of the new culture, resisting others, and slowly becoming someone who doesn't fully belong to just one place anymore.

You start building two identities

For most expats, a second identity develops alongside the original one. There's who you were at home, and there's who you become as, say, an American in Germany or a Brit in Japan—two versions of yourself shaped by different assumptions about daily life, from whether you need a car to how directly people speak to each other.

There's actually a name for this: bicultural identity integration. Basically, the sense that two identities can sit together instead of pulling in opposite directions. A review of biculturalism research found this kind of integration tends to lead to smoother psychological adjustment than sticking rigidly to one identity abroad. In practice, that tracks with what a lot of expats describe: not choosing one identity over the other, but slowly finding a way for both to coexist.

Home becomes harder to define

Ask most long-term expats where "home" is, and you'll rarely get a one-word answer. Is it the place you were born? The place you live now? Some people land on a simpler definition: home is wherever the people they care about are, regardless of the country. Others land somewhere in between, holding onto two or three places at once.

It's also common to meet people who've stopped identifying with a single country altogether, sometimes called "global citizens". Their life has spanned so many places, languages, and cultures that no single one feels like the full answer anymore.

Your manner of speaking shifts

Moving to a new country almost always changes how you speak, even if you move somewhere that technically shares your language, thanks to regional dialects, accents, and vocabulary.

For English speakers moving to continental Europe, this often shows up in small vocabulary swaps: British English was the classroom standard across much of Europe for decades, so American expats have historically had to adjust to be understood: swapping "apartment" for "flat," or "elevator" for "lift". That's shifting, too: a European classroom today would probably sound a lot more American, thanks to streaming and social media.

Learning the local language deepens the shift further. Many expats notice they start forgetting words in their native language the more fluent they become in the new one. Some also describe feeling like a different person entirely depending on which language they're speaking, since language and culture are so closely tied. This is part of why the structured, conversation-first classes we run at Lingoda focus so heavily on speaking practice: getting comfortable in a new language is as much about identity as it is about grammar.

Finding your voice in a new language

Curious what that shift feels like?

Friendships and family take on new meaning

Being an expat often changes how you build community, too. Especially when family is far away. Many expats say their approach to friendship shifts from casual to more intentional: instead of just someone to grab a drink with, you look for people you can genuinely rely on, who understand what it's like to start over somewhere new.

Over time, "family" for many expats stops being strictly about blood relation and starts being about who shows up for you. That's not a small adjustment. It's often one of the most meaningful parts of adapting to life abroad.

Reverse culture shock is real too

The identity shift doesn't stop when you go home to visit. Many expats describe reverse culture shock: the unsettling feeling of returning to your home country and realizing it doesn't fit the same way it used to, even though nothing about the place itself has changed. Simple things can feel jarring: overhearing every conversation in a crowded cafe, for instance, after years of tuning out languages you didn't understand. It's a sign that living abroad doesn't just add a new identity. It quietly reshapes the original one, too.

Cultural identity changes when you move abroad, and that's normal

Cultural identity change isn't a sign that something's gone wrong when you move abroad. It's one of the most normal parts of the process. You'll likely end up with two identities instead of one, a more flexible definition of home, a different way of speaking and connecting with people, and maybe even a bit of reverse culture shock the first time you go back. None of that means you're losing who you were. It means you're adding to it.

For a lot of expats, learning the local language is what makes that new identity start to feel like your own instead of just something you're getting through.

Ready to feel more at home in your new language?

See how Lingoda's live classes work