Can Your Language Shape How You Think?
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a
popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of
the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance,
there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity.
Neither the title, ¡§Science and Linguistics,¡¨ nor the magazine, M.I.T.¡¦s
Technology Review, was most people¡¦s idea of glamour. And the author, a
chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company
and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at
In particular, Whorf announced,
Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is
totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to
understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the
distinction between objects (like ¡§stone¡¨) and actions (like ¡§fall¡¨). For
decades, Whorf¡¦s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In
his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed
power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein¡¦s
concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the
Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf¡¦s theory
crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that
there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The
reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence
of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of
disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind
us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our
mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our
experience in significant and often surprising ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many
mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains
our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The
general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word
for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this
concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would
simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible
that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so
much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in
perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, ¡§Are you coming tomorrow?¡¨
do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English
speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it
difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else¡¦s misfortune? Or
think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language
determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn
anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers
to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover
how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned
linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact
about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: ¡§Languages differ
essentially in what they must convey and not in what
they may convey.¡¨ This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real
force of the mother tongue: 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 habitually obliges us to
think about.
Consider this example. Suppose I say
to you in English that ¡§I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.¡¨
You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the
right to tell you politely that it¡¦s none of your business. But if we were
speaking French or German, I wouldn¡¦t have the privilege to equivocate in this
way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about
the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This
does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the
differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors,
but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons
each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages
are obliged to do so.
On the other hand, English does
oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the
context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner
with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor¡¦s sex, but I do have to tell you something about
the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been
dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the
other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action
in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future
actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand
the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about
timing whenever they describe an action.
When your language routinely obliges
you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to
certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers
of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since
such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural
that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language
itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings,
memories and orientation in the world.
BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?
Let¡¦s take genders again. Languages
like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the
sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a
male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim.
What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman¡¦s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become
a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented
such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant ¡§The
Awful German Language.¡¨ But whereas he claimed that there was something
particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English
that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and
tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as
a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a
man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell
you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When
I speak English, I may say about a bed that ¡§it¡¨ is too soft, but as a native
Hebrew speaker, I actually feel ¡§she¡¨ is too soft. ¡§She¡¨ stays feminine all the
way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the
tip of the tongue.
In recent years, various experiments
have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of
speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists
compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many
inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German
bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance,
but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and
the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders,
stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an
apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs,
brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage.
When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of
characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have
more ¡§manly properties¡¨ like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as
more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are ¡§he¡¨
in German but ¡§she¡¨ in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French
and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a
cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette),
most of them wanted it to speak in a woman¡¦s voice, but Spanish speakers, for
whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a
gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that
¡§gendered languages¡¨ imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind
that these associations obstruct speakers¡¦ ability to commit information to
memory.
Of course, all this does not mean
that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate
objects do not really have biological sex ¡X a German woman rarely mistakes her
husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what
might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed
on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to
see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional
responses that English speakers ¡X stuck in their monochrome desert of ¡§its¡¨ ¡X
are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of ¡§bridge¡¨ in German and
Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in
The area where the most striking
evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the
language of space ¡X how we describe the orientation of the world around us.
Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You
might say: ¡§After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second
right, and then you¡¦ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the
right.¡¨ But in theory, you could also say: ¡§After the traffic lights, drive
north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and
you¡¦ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.¡¨
These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on
different systems of coordinates. The first
uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a
left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses
fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we
turn.
We find it useful to use geographic
directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric
coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces.
We don¡¦t say: ¡§When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the
second door to the east.¡¨ The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in
our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we
always know where ¡§behind¡¨ or ¡§in front of¡¨ us is. We don¡¦t need a map or a
compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the
egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate
visual fields.
But then a remote Australian
aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr,
from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization
that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply
¡§natural.¡¨ In fact, Guugu Yimithirr
doesn¡¦t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown
that Guugu Yimithirr does
not use words like ¡§left¡¨ or ¡§right,¡¨ ¡§in front of¡¨ or ¡§behind,¡¨ to describe
the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over
on the car seat to make room, they¡¦ll say ¡§move a bit to the east.¡¨ To tell you
where exactly they left something in your house, they¡¦ll say, ¡§I left it on the
southern edge of the western table.¡¨ Or they would warn you to ¡§look out for
that big ant just north of your foot.¡¨ Even when shown a film on television,
they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the
television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said
that he was ¡§coming northward.¡¨
When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered,
they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as
it happens, Guugu Yimithirr
is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical
coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to
So different languages certainly
make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this
necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By
now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn¡¦t have a
word for ¡§behind,¡¨ this doesn¡¦t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn¡¦t be
able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible
consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to
convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind
might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all
the time.
In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know
where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life.
You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night,
without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to
impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are
saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an
almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions,
regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether
outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a
spot-on sense of direction. They don¡¦t look at the sun and pause for a moment
of calculation before they say, ¡§There¡¦s an ant just north of your foot.¡¨ They
simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect
pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a
wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of
orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just
a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern
How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates
compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the
physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of
their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing
orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language
provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has
been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu
Yimithirr conversation is ¡§north,¡¨ ¡§south,¡¨ ¡§west¡¨ or
¡§east,¡¨ often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant
awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy:
studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic
directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such
an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless
and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr
speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn¡¦t explain it any
more than you can explain how you know where ¡§behind¡¨ is.
But there is more to the effects of
a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in
time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu
Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything
that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal
directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story
of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older
person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped
into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to
discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the
loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic
content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered
throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the
western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a
giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just
made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed
some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched
exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were
the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the
direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic
orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two
films.
Psychological experiments have also
shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu
Yimithirr-style languages even remember ¡§the same
reality¡¨ differently from us. There has been heated debate about the
interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems
compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we
commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not
to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in
a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking
doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into
his room, you¡¦ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the
left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same
bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the
wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and
the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice.
But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite
different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his
room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone
that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you
will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language
will see and remember two different rooms.
It is not easy for us to conceive
how Guugu Yimithirr
speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions
imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy
to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other
than spatial orientation ¡X whether they influence the speaker¡¦s sense of
identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But
one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally
assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a
cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at
the center of the world, and it would never occur to
us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than
to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were
thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.
IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our
experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments
that we even perceive colors through the lens of our
mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the
spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as
distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are
trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color
if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our
experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our
language has a word for blue.
In coming years, researchers may
also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of
perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses
in
For many years, our mother tongue
was claimed to be a ¡§prison house¡¨ that constrained our capacity to reason.
Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken
as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But
surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in
our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of
deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions,
impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled
in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional
responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far
beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a
marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how
to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to
cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding
one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.
By GUY DEUTSCHER
Published: August 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=5