Words, and therefore languages, help us comprehend the world. With them, we can create mental representations of what we see and feel, and thus articulate them for others to understand.
From linguistic trivia and slang terms to untranslatable words, we are often intrigued and humoured by things that other cultures have picked up on. In particular, untranslatable words expand our emotional and cognitive horizons. Take, for instance, the German noun Treppenwitz, or 'staircase wit' — the common phenomenon of a witty remark that comes to mind only after the interaction has passed. With languages, we see how different values and emotions are perceived and experienced in other cultures.
In the same vein, how do languages influence our mental frameworks?
As the Roman Emperor Charlemagne said, "To have another language is to possess a second soul." So how much of an impact does language have on our perception of the world?
Same person, different personality
A study found that when Mexican-Americans were asked to take a personality test in both English and Spanish, the results differed. Subjects scored higher in extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness when they took the English version of the test. Potential reasons for this could be because individualistic societies, like the U.S., prioritise values such as assertiveness and achievements, which are less important in collectivistic cultures like in Mexico. The speaker sees themselves through the cultural values of the language spoken, which would be a particularly strong case for bilingual people.
This can have a potentially big impact on childhood development too. An essay by a senior editor at The New Republic explained why he stopped speaking only Hebrew to his three-year-old daughter. He realised that "...[his] Hebrew self turns out to be much colder, more earnest, and, let's face it, less articulate." By switching to English, he strengthened the emotional bond with his daughter as it curiously opened up more conversational avenues than talking in Hebrew did.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Bard College say that code-switching is a strategy to express emotions differently, especially when communicating with children. Bilingual parents, like The New Republic senior editor, use a specific language to express an emotional concept which in turn influences the emotional development of their child.
Languages are therefore more than a communication tool. They are a powerful support of identity. Take George Orwell's classic novel, Nineteen-Eighty Four. While set in fiction, it shows how altering a language can change one's concept of identity, and thoughts and ideas that come with it. In the novel, a language called Newspeak has supplanted modern English. Words like 'bad' are replaced with 'ungood', and the concept of freedom is eliminated. The aim is to make an idea literally unthinkable, so far as the thought is dependent on words.
As we shall explore, languages can have affect how we view space, time, and colour, and how we make decisions. It can also shape how we view things that have personal weight to us.
The ups and downs over time
Generally, we interpret time by experiences and moments marked by objects and events that are impermanent and that occur in a continuous unidirectional change. Time can, however, be interpreted differently in spatial terms, depending on the language spoken.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky conducted a study with English and Mandarin speakers to show how time is interpreted differently based on the language spoken.
In English, time is predominantly described using front and back terms. For example, good times are ahead of us, and hardships are behind us. Move meetings forward, and push deadlines back. Events are ordered using asymmetric horizontal spatial relations.
While front and back time metaphors are present in Mandarin too, such as 前 'qian' (front) and 后 'hou' (back), vertical metaphors are commonly used to describe time in terms of months, weeks, and semesters. For example, past events are referred to using the character 上 'shang', or up, and future events as 下 'xia', or down. This can be especially confusing for a native English speaker, as the upward direction seems to indicate upcoming or future events from their perspective of time.
The researchers found that test subjects used spatial reasoning in accordance to their spoken language, even in a non-linguistic task. While both groups demonstrated a left-to-right representation of time, only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern too. This was also true for bilinguals, who were more likely to arrange time vertically when tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English.
A Whodunnit conundrum
Cross-linguistic differences may affect how people remember and interpret causal events, and even how much blame they attach to those connected to the events. A study conducted by Stanford researchers found that Japanese and Spanish speakers didn't recall who was to blame for accidental events as much as English speakers do.
While English speakers would likely say, "John broke the vase", speakers of Japanese and Spanish would say "the vase broke" or "the vase was broken." In other words, English speakers remember who did it, and Japanese and Spanish speakers are more likely to remember the intention or the accident itself based on the different sentence constructions of each language.
This would have interesting implications for blame and punishment. Crime witnesses may punish someone more depending on the language guiding the reasoning behind the events.
Workout your brain by learning a language
Just like learning any other skill, mastering a language can impact our thinking and perception. Numerous studies have found that learning a new language can change how your brain pulls information together, enabling you to gain more perspectives on a particular issue.
With Japanese-based company Rakuten, this proved to be the case when the retail giant mandated English proficiency within two years for all employees.
Tsedal Neeley, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, studied the company for five consecutive years after the mandate and realised that the employees who weren't native Japanese speakers or English speakers proved to be the most effective workers in the end, despite undergoing the roughest start.
Neeley says it is likely that the steep linguistic and cultural curve enabled this group to be more flexible and adaptable with their thinking. Language learning involves information exchange between the left and right sides of the brain, and several studies suggest that this data transfer strengthens cortical connectivity and increases white matter volume.
Making the brain perform mental gymnastics such as what the Rakuten employees had to do will make them better at analysing their surroundings, multitasking, and problem solving. While this probably won't completely change their perception of the world, it will equip them with useful analytical and thinking skills that positively impact their mental frameworks.
Linguistic diversity and beyond
While learning a new language may reveal a new way of looking at another culture and increase our thinking agility, it is unlikely to completely alter our perceptions and thoughts of the world and others. If that were the case, the cultural gaps between countries would be markedly wider with more challenges that come with it.
Similarly, different language speakers don't process objective situations and thoughts as differently as some may believe.
A study looked at how different language speakers perceived events by recording eye motion. Despite the cross-language differences in describing bounded motion, like slide, walk, stride in English, and approach and descend in Greek, the researchers found that people viewed ongoing events with similar allocated attention, regardless of the language they spoke.
Our uncanny likeness across languages isn't limited to processing events and actions either. Another study by MIT cognitive scientists found that languages tend to have more words for the "warm" section of the colour spectrum than the "cooler" region. They found the same pattern when comparing data from the World Color Survey, which performed the same task for 110 languages around the world.
The above image is the colour spectrum based on the research, from warm tones to cool tones. The chart shows the most to least efficiently communicated colours, from left to right, in English, Spanish and Tsimane’ languages.
To find an explanation for this curious skew in colour words, the researchers analysed a database of 20,000 images and found that objects in the foreground of a scene are more likely to be a warm colour, with cooler colours found in backgrounds.
We naturally interact with and talk about objects closer to us, and colour is one way to tell them apart. Expanding the research to include societies in snowy or desert climates would also help consolidate the research even further.
Linguistic diversity reveals how ingenious and flexible the human mind is, especially with some 7,000 languages spoken around the world! As such, learning languages, and being fluent in more than one language can enhance and develop our metacognitive abilities. Comprehensive studies has been done to examine the question of how culture and language influence how people perceive the world, and therefore affect their ways of thinking. However, more rigorous research is needed to really study where the differences originate from, and how they influence our mental frameworks. Most studies have also been done by American students, which is a considerably tiny segment of the human population. A more diverse set of researchers from various cultures would lead to more unique findings in this area.
Questions such as, "Why do I think the way that I do? How can I think differently? What thoughts do I wish to create?" are still worth answering. For now, it's worth noting that while one's native language is important in shaping habitual thought, it does not entirely determine one's thinking.