Language Shapes Our Reality
It isn’t just for ordering drinks when you go on holiday. Though that is useful.
I was one of those children who had to count to ten in different languages while I brushed my teeth. No surprises, then, that when I went to university, I chose to read French and Spanish. I cannot say I worked particularly hard; though I did get to live in Paris and then Barcelona, where I had ample opportunity to indulge at least some of my many vices.
In a way it is a shame that I am no longer asked what I plan to ‘do’ with my languages degree, since only now, after about a decade of mulling it over, do I have a satisfying response. I always bridled at the notion that language was just a ‘tool’—a means to ask for directions, order wine, or defend yourself when your French girlfriend found out you also had a French boyfriend. Reducing language to mere use depressed me, just as it depresses me to hear people say that AI will make language-learning pointless. For language is not just something to be used. It shapes the way we perceive and experience the world.
Reducing language to mere use depressed me, just as it depresses me to hear people say that AI will make language-learning pointless.
This, of course, is not a novel insight. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, made famous by the film Arrival, proposed that the structure of language informs the thinking style and worldview of its speakers, and that, therefore, language determines how we see the world. But the Ancient Greeks beat them to it, as the Ancient Greeks tend to do. Plato suggested in his dialogue with Cratylus that certain conceptions of reality are embedded in language. The 18th century German Romantic Johann Georg Hamann, too, (curiously nicknamed ‘The Wizard of the North’), prefigured Sapir and Whorf, writing that ‘the lineaments of [a people’s] language will […] correspond to the direction of their mentality’.
Consider how we think about time. English speakers tend to talk about it as if it were a horizontal line, with the past behind us and the future before us. But speakers of Aymara, a language native to the Andes, view time the other way around. For them, the future, being unknown, is behind them, since they cannot see behind them. The past is ahead of them, since they can see what is ahead of them. For the speakers of Aymara, time is something that moves past us. We do not move through it.
Speakers of Aymara, a language native to the Andes, view time the other way around.
A commonly cited example in conversations about linguistic relativity is the Russian understanding of ‘blue’. Russian distinguishes between lighter blues (‘голубой’) and darker blues (‘синий’), and research suggests that because of this linguistic difference, Russians perceive these two shades as more distinct than we do. Language thus influences not just thought, but vision.
It is a matter of debate as to whether speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, an Aboriginal language in Australia, have a better sense of navigation because of their language. My hunch is that it does. Where we (English-speakers) use left and right, forward and back, speakers of this language use north, south, east and west. In order to do this, they must know where north is at all times. Hence it would seem to follow that they orient themselves more deftly than we do.
Where we (English-speakers) use left and right, forward and back, speakers of this language use north, south, east and west.
The existence of words and phrases in some languages but not others would seem to suggest at least that some cultures feel certain emotions with a greater depth or strength than others. The Portuguese have the rather beautiful word ‘saudade’ (immortalised by the great Cesaria Evora, who was known to like a cigarette and a drink during intermissions), which describes a deep longing for someone or something that is made more painful by the knowledge that we may never encounter him, her or it again. The Japanese phrase ‘mono no aware’ describes an exquisite sensitivity to the transient, seen most vividly in the living and dying of things in the natural world.
To learn another language is not just to get by a bit more easily when you go on holiday. It is to learn to perceive the world differently: to think differently, to feel differently, even to be someone different—or at least, someone with a broader perspective on the world. And that, in turn, throws light on your native language, your culture and you.
