Does Your Mother Tongue Shape Your Thinking?

Words are just ways to express what’s in our mind. Right? Well, maybe not quite so.

In a NY Times arti­cle titled “Does Your Lan­guage Shape How You Think?”, Lin­guist Guy Deutscher con­tends that our mother tongue in fact, trains our brain to think a cer­tain way, and even alters our per­cep­tion of reality.

Take words gen­der for exam­ple. While Eng­lish speak­ers can equiv­o­cally evoke meet­ing a ‘neigh­bour’ for lunch or din­ner with­out men­tion­ing their sex, French or Ger­man speak­ers do not have this flex­i­bil­ity. Whether they like it or not, they will have to reveal the sex of their din­ing companion.

It gets even more sub­tle when you con­sider that many Euro­pean lan­guages assign gen­ders on words refer­ring to inan­i­mate objects. As a native French speaker who has spent the past 20 years in a Chi­nese & Eng­lish speak­ing envi­ron­ment, I can relate to how lan­guage shapes our real­ity. After 20 years of using mostly Eng­lish as my main lan­guage, I still can’t shake off the deep and unex­plain­able feel­ing that the water in my glass is fem­i­nine and my bed is mas­cu­line. And my Chi­nese or Eng­lish speak­ing friends just can­not under­stand how my mobile phone and my uncon­scious mind (this is get­ting weird!) are mas­cu­line, but I vis­cer­ally know that they are.

As Guy Deutscher (whose mother tongue is Hebrew) points out: “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.” i.e. speak­ers of gendered-languages will have a range of emo­tional responses to objects that oth­ers will unaware of.

But the influ­ence of lan­guage in shap­ing our real­ity goes well beyond gen­ders. Take time for exam­ple. Deutscher’s men­tion that “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” is true. Past, present or future tense are usu­ally indi­cated either by con­text or by a word added at the end of the sen­tence. I smiled when I read this para­graph, because after 20 years, I still have not man­aged to com­pletely mas­ter the Can­tonese sense of time. To the ques­tion  “at what time do we meet”, it is not unusual to get an answer as pre­cise as “after 10″ (‘sap dim gei’ mean­ing, 10 and a bit”).

And then there is the issue of how lan­guage describes space. The Aus­tralian abo­rig­i­nal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr for exam­ple, does not have a word for “left”, or one for “right”, or any word to describe space ego­cen­tri­cally like we do. In Guugu Yimithirr, space is described geo­graph­i­cally in terms of East, West etc… Deutscher describes the story of a young boy who was sent to study dance in another vil­lage and who could not fol­low the instruc­tions of his mas­ter (lift your north­ern leg, bend your head towards the south etc…) because he had lost his sense of car­di­nal directions.

David Bohm, in his essay ‘On Dia­logue’ men­tions that cul­ture is shared mean­ing. Lan­guage cer­tainly con­tributes for a large part to that shared mean­ing in how it shapes the way we think and per­ceive the world around us. The chal­lenge then, is to become aware of the end result of this shap­ing process and to remain open to other ways of think­ing and perceiving.

Click the links below to read the full NY Times arti­cle, and to dis­cover how The Mas­ter­Minds can assist you toward a greater mas­tery of lan­guage and a greater cog­ni­tive and behav­ioural flexibility.

NY Times Article

Mas­tery Work­shops & Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Trainings

Share on Facebook