By Richita Sarda (2024)
Language is a means by which humans communicate complex ideas with one another and interact with the world around them. It is through language that we are able to trigger emotion, imagination and action. With over 7,000 languages existing in the world today, each possessing its own rules dictating semantics and vocabulary, one might pose the question of whether different languages enable their users to express their ideas and observations differently, and ultimately think differently. While some believe that language is just a way to represent one’s thoughts and does not affect any thought processing, research suggests that it might actually have more of an impact on the way our minds perceive reality, exploring which could in turn take us one step closer to our understanding of the very nature of humanity.
Research suggests that more aspects of our thinking involve language than previously thought. For instance, things like distinguishing colours, counting and orienting ourselves are all reliant on our usage of language and when we are blocked from using a language our ability to perform such tasks is impaired. It so happens that “thinking” appears to involve both linguistic and non-linguistic processes. Much of the adult human’s mental activity seems to depend on its ability to harness language. It is therefore not a leap to suggest that the language in which one communicates – with all its unique conventions – does directly impact one’s thoughts.
The field of study that deals with the interdependence of language and thought is Linguistic Relativity. Linguistic Relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition, another term for which is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named jointly after two of the earliest pioneers of the concept – despite them never co-authoring a paper. Sapir was interested in studying language and different worldviews, specifically, he was interested in how language and culture influence each other. Whorf, his student, took this work further to explore how different languages may shape thought and behaviour. Although the original hypothesis has been critiqued for its extreme ideas and lack of supporting evidence, recent research has been produced that supports a weaker version of it, suggesting that while language shapes an individual’s thoughts, it does not necessarily limit them.
Language is generally a reflection of a population’s cultural values. For example, languages like Japanese often drop pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘you’, reflecting the community’s collectivistic values. A repetitive lack of distinct differentiation during communication between the self and others might instil in the speakers a greater sense of comradery with their community members. However, when comparing the cognitive patterns of speakers using different languages, it can be difficult to disentangle their thoughts and behaviours from external factors like the cultural values the speakers ascribe to, making it harder to determine whether it really is the structural differences of a language that cause them to think differently. This conflict can be resolved by teaching speakers of a language, metaphors from another language and examining the impact of that on their thinking.
It is known that people remember things they pay more attention to. Different languages, through sentence structure and grammar, require their speakers to put emphasis on certain aspects of a sentence rather than others. This may result in speakers of two languages remembering things differently. An example of this phenomenon arises when we explore how speakers describe events. English – an agentive language – prefers to phrase events in terms of people doing things, using sentences like “Trevor broke the vase” even for accidents whereas languages like Japanese and Spanish would say something similar to “the vase broke” or “the vase broke itself”. Studies find that such disparity in phrasing might lead to differences in how speakers of various languages may remember an accidental event. This has obvious consequences for eyewitness testimonies.
In a study conducted in 2010, English, Spanish, and Japanese speakers were shown videos of two men popping balloons, breaking eggs, and spilling drinks on each other either accidentally or on purpose. They were then given a surprise memory test. All three groups of people described intentional events agentively, saying things like “He popped the balloon” and remembering who did the action equally as well. When describing accidents, on the other hand, Spanish and Japanese speakers were less likely to remember who had caused the accident. Our difference in the phrasing of an accident – using either an agentive or a non-agentive language – also has implications on the placement of blame. You are more likely to hold someone in contempt for breaking a vase if one phrased the event as “He broke the vase” rather than “The vase broke itself”.
Languages can also change how we categorise things. Words for things like colours are an attempt to classify a spectrum of sensations into discrete items. Because there exists no one rule for determining where one colour ends and the other begins, languages have to take the liberty of deciding this for themselves, ending up with colour categories that are different from other languages. For instance, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are not just different shades of the same colour, but two entirely different colours. This means that when observing a change between the two, the Russian speaker’s brain makes a sort of jump when observing a change from light to dark blue, acknowledging the beginning of an entirely different category of colour. The English speaker’s brain does no such thing. When asked to identify the minor variances of the colour blue, Russians thus fare much better – an advantage that disappears when the Russian speakers are blocked from accessing their language as usual.
Similar to colours, emotions too exist across a spectrum. Different languages categorise emotions differently and establish different boundaries between emotions, resulting in certain words for emotions that cannot be translated into other languages. Words and grammatical structures themselves do not manifest feelings but they can help in our understanding of them. For instance, let us consider a hypothetical language where there is an umbrella word for all feelings of displeasure and specific words like “angry” and “sad” do not exist. The lack of these words does not mean that the speakers of this language do not experience anger and sadness but it may lead to them being unable to understand and explain – to themselves and others – the subtle differences between these feelings and therefore hinder their ability to validate and deal with them.
Another aspect of our perception of reality that is altered by the usage of different languages is our idealisation of space. Lera Boroditsky, a linguist fascinated by the interdependency of language and thought, was led by her research to a small aboriginal town in northern Australia to investigate how the Kuuk Thaayorre talk about space. The locals of this land use the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west to describe space, unlike speakers of several other languages like English who use words like ‘right’, ‘left’, ‘centre’, ‘up’ and ‘down’. For example, instead of saying “the house is to the left of the tree”, they would say “the house is to the north of the tree”. They rely on an absolute reference frame, resulting in tremendous navigation capabilities beyond what we previously thought was humanly possible. The Kuuk Thaayorre are thus much better at keeping track of themselves in unfamiliar landscapes, something they are only able to do because the language they speak requires them to think of space in a certain way. Earlier, it was thought that the biology of the human was what prevented it from being able to navigate its surroundings as well as most other animals, however, the real culprit may have been the restrictions posed by most commonly used languages.
While this difference in our perception of space might seem like just an interesting quirk, it actually has much larger implications. We rely on our spatial knowledge to build other more complex, more abstract, representations. Representations of things like numbers, musical pitch, time, kinship relations, morality and emotions are all proven to be direct products of how we think about space. Does that mean that speakers of different languages perceive these things differently as well? The answer, as it turns out, is yes, they do.
Often, we use spatial metaphors to refer to durations of time. In languages like English, French and German, speakers refer to the same in terms of ‘lengths’ of time similar to if they were lines in space, calling events ‘short’ or ‘long’. However, Greek or Spanish speakers tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a box that could be filled or emptied. When we think of time linearly, there is a strict order of moments in time that cannot be interchanged in their places. However, thinking of time as the Greeks do, gives it a much more fluid quality. The physics of time has been a much-debated and complex issue. For many years, time was viewed somewhat as an arrow, starting at the past and directed towards the future, perhaps due to the fact that most of the work in this field was done by English, French and German scientists. Modern theories, on the other hand, suggest time to not move at all, instead for the past, present and future to somehow exist simultaneously. It is possible that the common metaphor for time as a linear entity has inhibited progress in its understanding, and maybe still does to this day.
The variations in our perception of time do not end there, however. A 2013 study conducted by Yale economist Keith Chen aimed to find out the differences in the thoughts and behaviours between those who spoke ‘futureless’ languages (languages that have no grammatical marking of a future tense) and those who spoke ‘futured’ languages (languages that do have grammatical markings for a future tense). The study found that those who spoke futureless languages saved more, retired with more wealth, smoked less and were less obese than speakers of futured languages like English. This effect has been termed the linguistics-savings hypothesis and has been replicated in many cross-cultural and cross-country studies.
Another study conducted in 2018 on a group of primary school students from the bilingual city of Merano, Italy where half the inhabitants speak Italian, a futured language, and the other half German, a futureless language, further backs this effect. 1,154 students were tested on their ability to resist temptation. They were asked whether they would like to be given two tokens (which could be traded in for presents) at the end of the experiment or wait for four weeks to get a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens). It was found that on average the German-speaking students were 16% more likely to be able to wait.
You might ask, then, what of those of us who speak more than one language? How does that affect how we think? Countless studies have shown that when speakers are taught to use the metaphors of another language (for example, an English speaker being taught to use size metaphors for describing time), their cognitive performance in that aspect of thinking begins to resemble that of the users of this new language in that aspect. This shows that when you are learning to speak another language, you are not just learning a new set of words and syntactic rules, but you are also learning an entirely new way of thinking.
Many studies have shown that learning a new language can change the way that the human mind pulls information together, offering multilingual individuals additional perspectives on several issues. This ability to see both sides of an argument and take multiple viewpoints into consideration makes them great at conflict resolution and decision-making. There are other benefits to multilingualism as well, including having a better memory and increased levels of confidence.
While it might be tempting to think so, it is important to emphasise that thought does not entirely depend on language and in fact, language is only a small part of the machine that creates thoughts and manifests behaviour. Differences between languages are amplified when translated and may not necessarily result in thought that is radically different. The differences revolve largely around the way we perceive things and not directly around the kinds of thoughts we have.
The way we think is too complex and flexible to be dictated only by the syntactical rules of a language, however, it is certain that language does play a role in how we perceive reality. Research into how language affects the way we think can help us understand how our minds create knowledge and construct reality and in turn, help us realise just what makes us human.
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