xabiaaldia.es - Does language dictate the way we think?

Portada > Science

Does language dictate the way we think?

24/09/2010 - 11:19

0 comentarios

Research is starting to provide evidence that people who speak differently, think differently. It seems that language conditions the way we view the world, and even the way we act.

Some Amazon tribes can only count up to two. For numbers greater than two they use a word meaning "many." People who speak the language known as "Tzeltal" do not have words for left or right, instead they use words which refer to the mountain slope that dominates their villages. So they use words which mean "up the slope" (which is roughly southward) or "down the slope" (roughly northward). They use these words when moving around on flat land or indoors, and even when describing the arrangement of objects.

Does this mean that the language we speak dictates the way we think? Do people who speak Tzeltal not understand the concepts of left and right? Does someone who speaks Spanish think differently from someone who speaks English just because of the language they use?

This idea, called linguistic determinism, was put forward by US linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1940, and became the basis of courses on language throughout the early 1970s. If it were true, then speakers of one language would find it impossible or very difficult to think in a way which comes naturally to the speakers of another language. Also, differences in thinking would be caused by differences in language, rather than a result of culture and environment.

Whorf took the extreme view that if the language had no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. This is patently untrue. The German word "schadenfreude" has no equivalent in English, but we all understand its meaning: the pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. Mandarin Chinese speakers have no grammar for the present, past and future tenses, but they certainly understand what these concepts are.

What language obliges us to think

Although Whorf's ideas of linguistic determinism have been largely discredited, research from around the world is providing evidence that people who speak different languages do actually think differently, and that accidents of grammar can affect how we see reality. Manchester University linguist Guy Deutscher subscribes to the view that if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think, but rather because of what it obliges us to think.

For example, an English person can have an entire conversation about "a friend" without once revealing their gender: "I met an old friend yesterday. They said how great I looked" (This can create some interesting misunderstandings!). However, a Spanish speaker is obliged to reveal the gender of the friend (amigo/amiga) from the outset.

When we learn different languages, we have to learn to pay attention to different things. English speakers learning Spanish have difficulty in deciding when to use "ser" and "estar", because there is no such distinction in English. Spanish speakers have a similar problem with our words "make" and "do," for which they have only one word, "hacer."

The gender of nouns seems to influence how people describe objects. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University writes:

"In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a key -a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish-, the German speakers were more likely to use words like hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. To describe a bridge (The Millau Viaduct), which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, and the Spanish speakers said big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering. This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender."

Basic concepts, such as how we perceive time and space can also be influenced by language. For example, most European languages describe time as a horizontal line. The past is behind us, the future in front. Mandarin Chinese use a vertical metaphor, the next month is the "down month" and the previous is the "up month". This is not just an idiom, but a real concept. If I stand next to you and point to a space in front saying: If that place is "today", where would you put tomorrow? English speakers will almost always point horizontally, but Mandarin speakers will seven or eight times more frequently point vertically.

An interesting difference between Spanish and English speakers is the concept of the duration of time. English speakers prefer to describe the duration of a debate or meeting in terms of length (short, long), while Greek and Spanish speakers rely more on words relating to size and quantity "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long".

Action orientated or conditional

Scientific research on how language might affect thought is still in its infancy, though there are many anecdotal hints on its possible effects. According to Boroditsky, English speakers say "she broke the bowl" even if it smashed accidentally. Spanish and Japanese describe the same event in a more passive manner "the bowl broke itself / el tazón se rompió". When people are shown a video of the event, English speakers remember who was to blame even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers remember it less well than they do intentional actions. This raises questions about whether language affects even something as basic as how we think about cause and effect.

However, people do learn other languages. Many are bilingual, or even multilingual. So how does this affect the way they think? Dr. Shai Danziger a cognitive psychologist who studied both Hebrew and English as a child, says he reacts differently in the two languages. "I think English is more polite than Hebrew, which involves more chutzpa. It seems that people can present different personalities in different environments." He said that he thought Israelis who speak English think differently and behave more politely while using English than when they speak in Hebrew. Being in an English-speaking environment might even make them drive more safely.

Linguists and psychologists continue to argue and hold different views on the significance of these studies, but here is an observation which provides some food for thought for those of us who live in a multicultural community:

"It would take a book-length study to show how language influences culture, but I would suggest that in day to day life the interaction between peoples in say South America are distinct from those of Anglo North America. This is due in part to the structure of the languages. English speaking Americans are more pragmatic and direct in their approach to everyday problems than are Spanish speaking peoples. It's no accident that both Empiricism and Pragmatism originated in English speaking countries. It's also no accident that the most popular genre in Latin America are romances (which are today called tele-novelas and which also exist in graphic book forms).

Daily life in many of these countries is lived between the conditional tense and the subjunctive, which is to say between the hypothetical if...then and the contrary-to-fact subjunctive mood.

I am being facetious but not by much."