We look like self-made people, but we are what we are thanks to our great sense of observance. It seems unbelievable, but we are the greatest imitators in the world. That's where our evolution comes from.
We imitate from the moment we are born. The habits we learn in the family we keep for the rest of our lives, the way we gesture, some idioms when we speak, even the way we walk, talk, laugh, eat, we look like our relatives and the people we meet.
We also have the tendency to imitate the ways of being of the people closest to us and always the predominant factor is our observation, we see something, we copy it and we practice it.
I remember when I was young I had several friends from vocational school, but there was one person among them who influenced me the most. I copied her way of telling jokes, the way she said some phrases, to the point that someone once saw us talking and dared to tell me that I was a faithful copy of the other one.
I would never have realized that until my own sister told me. Of course at the time I didn't pay any attention to it and just laughed, but soon after I analyzed some of the things I did and said I realized that my sister was right.
I had adopted expressions and gestures of my friend. I even realized that when I was talking with another of my friends I also followed her way of speaking and ended up conversing with some of her gestures.
The horror! I had never realized that I was a great imitator. I don't know what this is about but I did it for a long time, I remember one time I was going to travel by ship to a nearby island in my country. I took the ticket, bought the ticket for my car and while waiting for an office to open there was a queue, half way.
I mean, people were lined up one after the other as they were added to the group and we waited for someone to open to serve us. The thing is, while we were waiting, the people I had around to hang out with decided to chat about the trip.
The person who turned out to be the most talkative was a lady with a Spanish accent and me. As the conversation became more pleasant, it got longer. We ended up talking about other things about the trip, but what I began to realize is that I was imitating the way this lady next to me was talking.
I mean, I was imitating the Spanish dialect. The lady didn't seem to mind and I don't realize this until a third person was added to our conversation.
That person of course also spoke my dialect and in order for me to talk to her I would have to speak like her. I realized that I was using my unconscious imitation and I had to make a great effort to find my sense of auditory orientation again and return to my way of speaking.
I don't know if I succeeded. I don't remember now. We were attended to as the office opened. We picked up what we were going to get and each to his own, I went back to my family and everything was forgotten.
But when I went to study at the university, the dialect there is different from that of my region. Guess what? I adopted that dialect. By the time I was able to return home I was speaking the dialect of the Venezuelan Andes and my northeastern dialect had been hidden for months.
I don't do it intentionally. It’s an involuntary and unconscious imitation, but this one I could not escape so easily. Why? Well, I had to work vacations when I came home from college breaks. I had to scrape together money to pay for months of room, board and whatever else I needed to pay for.
So, I had to start working as soon as I got home. There at the hospital, people who knew me made fun of me and asked me to change the way I spoke. I couldn't, I didn't even realize that I spoke differently.
But as much as people told me to listen to myself, I did and it was real. I didn't speak my oriental dialect, I spoke the dialect of the Andes. But you know, it was not easy to try to get rid of that way of speaking and when I was trying my best not to say any more typical Andean phrases, I had to go back there.
I lived there for 8 years. I kept that way of speaking. To the point that many times some people ask me if I am from Merida.
It’s not that I imitate because I want to, it’s that I imitate in an unconscious way and it is a very difficult characteristic to erase from my personality.
Tell me something, do you know a person who has these habits like mine? I would like to know. I never gave it importance, because I learned that everyone is as he/she is and this is something that is in my brain and I cannot avoid it. I’m me but I’m a dialect imitator.
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It is normal to imitate other people consciously or unconsciously. Maybe you do it to be understood better. It has happened to me that I watch many videos where the language spoken is Spanish from Spain and I have to think correctly what I will say or else I start to speak like the Spanish. We also imitate behaviors, if we spend a lot of time with someone who has different behaviors than ours we can start to react like that person.
Because of this type of imitation it is good for children to have a good figure to follow or imitate. Forgive me for talking about children, but it reminded me of my childhood. When I was between 8 and 12 years old, it was normal for me to imitate my brother, not only because he was older than me, but also because he was my role model. My parents told me to stop imitating my brother, but it wasn't that I wanted to imitate him, it's that so much time being around him made me acquire my brother's behavior.
So it's totally normal, but it's easier to observe in children than in adults. An adult already has certain behaviors acquired throughout his life, which are complex to change, now the dialect is different, because we can modify it "easily" to adapt to the environment in which we are. My brother is already 2 years old in Spain and in a short time he had to start speaking Spanish to be understood.