Through the language glass

Could the language you speak affect how you think? The idea has long been shunned by academics as a relic of an imperialist, racist past when non- Europeans were deemed damned to low level thought by their “unsophisticated” languages. But not all who have held this view have been racist — haven’t we all at times thought something along these lines? Perhaps the strict order of German has something to do the country’s many famous philosophers and scientists? And surely the lack of a future tense, as in some languages, must affect their view of the time?

In his 2011 book ‘Through the Language Glass’, linguist Guy Deutscher addresses these issues head on. And while he dismisses dinner table generalisations about German (really quite an erratic language) and future tenses (“I am going to leave next week” makes perfect sense and yet has no future tense), he points to convincing evidence that yes, the language you speak does change how you view the world, although perhaps more subtly than we might think. The influence has been shown in three areas- our perception of colour, space and gender.

Russian eyes and British eyes can see just as well as each other — so how on earth could they perceive colour differently? The question of colour and language was started by the 19th Century British Prime Minister William Gladstone who noticed something peculiar about ancient Greek poems — they always called the sea “black”. That this happened without fail made it much more than poetic imagery — there simply wasn’t a word in ancient Greek for the colour blue. It was later discovered that many tribal language still don’t have words for certain colours, the reason being that, as with the Greeks, without artificial dyes there simply wasn’t any need for these words.

While it may seem strange to us that someone might see blue as just another shade of green, say, the English word “blue” seems equally strange to a Russian, who uses separate words to describe light, sky blue and dark navy blue. But surely we still see the same colours? Incredibly, no.

It turns out that when your language provides a separate word for a colour, it seems further away from other colours than if the two were linguistically on the same spectrum. So Russians don’t just see the different shades of blue, they really do seem like fundamentally different colours, unlike to a native English speaker, and they exaggerate the difference between them when shown a colour chart. This is entirely psychological, of course, but entirely measurable too.

Language also effects how you orientate yourself. While most languages use ego centric coordinates (in front of, behind, left, right), some use the cardinal coordinates of North, South East and West in everyday language. In English your right shoe will always be on your right foot, but to some Australian Aborigines you could wear a shoe on your North foot and turn around to find it on your South foot. The fact that their language sees these as different setups means that their concept of which two situations are the same is quite different to those of us with ego- centric languages. A mirror image may not feel like a mirror image.

The effect of language on how we perceive gender is especially interesting to us Anglophones who aren’t used to inanimate objects having a gender, as they do in French and Spanish. It turns out that although the allocation of gender to a particular noun is random and varies between languages (“bed” is feminine in Spanish — la cama – and masculine in French — le lit); speakers actually associate human gender stereotypes with those words. So when French speakers are asked to choose from a list of words to describe a bed, they choose masculine stereotypes like “strong” whereas Spaniards will chose feminine stereotypes such as “delicate”. Incredibly, they make these associations even when speaking in English — their mother tongue has “tainted” them.

In this short, entertaining and highly readable book, Deutscher delves into all of these areas, concluding that people who speak different languages really do have a different perspective on the world, albeit subtly different. But most exciting is that so many of these revelations have been made in recent decades – with advances in brain scanning techniques – the real treasures of linguistics may be just on the horizon.