How language changes the way we think
If you ask me what is the coolest language in the world, I will answer you without thinking: Heptapods’s (yes, alien’s). They are this circle-shaped characters that are not just beautiful calligraphy, but also once learnt, will break the linearity of time, or in plain words, allow one to see the future.
This is all the movie Arrival is about (tiny spoiler alert). It was mind-blowing to see it the first time, but it does make sense how language can actually affect the way we think. Normally we would think thoughts come first, language follows. But we forget the fact that language, as a carrier of thoughts, is also a thought itself. The same information can be depicted and expressed differently in different languages. It can be the syntax, the vocabulary, the sound, the expression that are different. As we use a language, we are also internalizing the thinking behind the language without realizing. It’s like putting on a different thinking hat. Or as Charlemagne put it: “To Learn a Second Language is to Possess a Second Soul.” In extreme cases like Arrival, one can possess Oracle by picking up a language (an alien one, of course).
Personally, I’m obsessed with spotting the difference between Chinese and English. The underlying implication is fascinating. When giving encouragement and support to someone about to take a quest, for example, a job interview, English speakers will say “good luck”, while Chinese will say “jia you”, which literally means pumping gas. It works like cheerleading and conveys a mix of “keep up the hard work” and “buck up”. You see how here English focuses on the role of luck in success and Chinese focuses on the role of efforts. Another example is pronouns. Chinese often mix up she and he when speaking English because he and she in Chinese are both pronounced “ta”. I don’t think about the gender of the person I’m referring to when speaking Chinese. But in English, after numerous awkward mix-ups, I tend to be more conscious about their gender identity.
How does language affect the way we think? The exact question was asked and studied by Benjamin Lee Whorf back in the 1940s. A chemical engineer by day and a linguist by night, Whorf together with his mentor Edward Sapir at Yale university, claimed that language can affect, even determine, people’s thoughts. This is called “linguistic relativity”, meaning that people’s perceptions of world are relative to the language they speak. He studied Hopi, a Native American language in northeastern Arizona, and found that there is no Hopi words for units of time like there is in English. He concluded that Hopi treats time as a continuum rather than countable units, and argued that this affects their culture and behavior fundamentally.
Although there is a lot of skepticism and criticism over Whorf’s argument that language actually determines our thoughts, there is growing evidence of how language influences the way we think. For example, in a study by a Berkeley professor Susan Ervin-Tripp, the same group of Japanese-American women gave different responses to the same question, depending on which language is used. For the sentence beginning, “When my wishes conflict with my family,” the response in Japanese was, “ … it is a time of great unhappiness,” whereas the English response was, “… I do what I want.” Another study by three researchers at the University of California, Merced, asked English-Spanish speakers in the U.S. to take a series of tests in different languages. The test is designed to give the participants only a fraction of a second to categorize words so as to reveal the subconscious preferences. It is found that when taking the test in Spanish, participants showed a greater preference for other Hispanic, but in English, such preference disappeared. As one of the researchers put it: “It’s like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer.”
It’s quite shocking to see how language taps into our mind and shapes the way we think. More importantly, it reminds us how prevalent and intractable unconscious bias can be, and we should fight against it much harder. Think about French for example, the beautiful language actually has ingrained gender bias. Many nouns, including those referring to professions, don’t have feminine version, and when it comes to syntax, “the masculine dominates over the feminine.” Before you dismiss the idea of making French gender-neutral, but with more and more evidence corroborating that language can change the way we think, we must think again and think harder.
In a way, you are how you speak.
