Articles and Stories

April 9, 2013

How does our mother tongue shape the way we think about our world? This is not a new question, but an interesting one to examine. There is no evidence that suggests that the language we learn actually forces us to or forbids us from thinking anything specific. However, considering the way languages differ in their complexity and amount or type of information conveyed, it seems likely that it would affect where we place more or less importance and how we might view the world. It may not force us to think something, but it might encourage us to think in a particular way.

For example, if I were to tell my friend in English that I had dinner recently with a neighbor, it is not clear whether the neighbor is a male or female. I don’t have this option in other languages such as French or German. I would be forced to specify voisin or voisine in French or Nachbar or Nachbarin in German. In English, my friend, if particularly curious, would be tempted to ask whether my neighbor was male or female which might imply something romantic or not, to which I would have the right to answer or not. So is it that if your mother tongue is English, you don’t consider it important whether one is male or female?  Or is there more curiosity about it precisely because the language does not oblige this information? Sometimes when information is left out, it becomes more interesting or important than if it were included.

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 whether my neighbor is male or female, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I had dinner, I’m having dinner, I have had dinner, I will have dinner, etc.  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. So it would follow that the more languages you speak or are exposed to from a young age, the wider your perspective on the world. This means understanding other cultures and motivations, something that is desperately needed in our world today.