Out there on the Internet, you’ll find a popular quote, or a version of it, that is attributed to everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Margaret Thatcher to that ever elusive but always quotable Anonymous. Throw in a couple of variations claimed by random small-time bloggers, and you’d have us believing that we all agree on this one thing: that thoughts become words, words become actions and after a few other things becoming things, it all becomes our destiny.
But what if these renowned thinkers like Gandhi and Thatcher (and those random bloggers) have it just the littlest bit backwards? What if it’s also true that our words become our thoughts before our thoughts become our words?
In a recent episode of Hidden Brain, host Shankar Vedantam interviewed cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, whose research shows profound correlations between between language and thought, suggesting that the way we think is shaped in great part by our language.
Boroditsky, for example, considers the way that grammatical gender—assigning gender to nouns so that in Spanish, the word for sun is masculine and the moon is feminine, while the opposite occurs in German, for instance—will lead the speakers of those languages to perceive certain objects as having traditionally masculine traits (ie, strong) while other objects may be seen as having more traditionally feminine traits (ie, elegant).
In other cases, Boroditsky considers that the lack of specific number words in some languages serves to prevent those cultures from making certain technological advances because they do not have the words for exact numbers which are necessary to perform complex mathematics such as algebra and trigonometry or to develop through the fields of architecture or engineering.
The way in which we perceive time and direction are also bound up with language. In those societies where direction is solely oriented to the landscape (north, south, east, west) as opposed to the body (left, right), time will typically only flow from east to west, so that the direction that one might lay out objects chronologically will vary depending on which direction one is facing.
When I was first learning Spanish, I was struck by the idea that a person didn’t cause things to happen accidentally. That is, if I were washing dishes and dropped a plate, I wouldn’t say that I was washing dishes and dropped a plate. I would say that I was washing dishes and a plate dropped itself. Boroditsky discusses this linguistic feature in the interview, suggesting that the difference in perception between an English speaker and a Spanish speaker in this type of circumstance is that the English speaker will more likely be focused on “who did it” while the Spanish speaker may emphasize that the plate breaking was accidental. Or, the English speaker may be more concerned with blame and punishment where the Spanish speaker is more interested in expressing the event itself. What we focus on in such circumstances, and what details we recall later, is heavily influenced by the way our language works.
When I was introduced to this—to my ear, awkward—construction, it was explained to me that the effect (or perhaps it was believed to be the cause) of using language in this way was that a Spanish speaker was able relieve himself of responsibility. It’s too bad this was the explanation, rather than recognizing a simple difference in focus, a difference in what is valued. The person who explained this grammatical feature to me attached a value judgment to it, rendering Spanish speakers as a whole to be somehow morally deficient. Looking back on it now, it seems to me an argument—and a good one—might be made that the less deficient model is the more passive construction, relieving a person of the need to affix blame, and rather allow one to focus on the fact that it happened at all. The dish is broken; let’s take care of that.
Boroditsky’s research suggests that speaking more than one language can help us approach things with at least somewhat more openness. Returning to the idea of gendered language, their studies found that a monolingual individual may have internalized the gendered properties of an object and would consider the object to be masculine or feminine because that is its intrinsic gender property, while a bilingual person—familiar with the manner in which gendered language operates, and even quite possibly speaking languages in which that same object might be gendered differently—perceives that the gendered properties of the object are a consequence of the way that the language works. Having two or more linguistic frameworks within which to work—and there’s reason to believe from the research that while operating in one language we have our other language(s) still tracking in the background—enables us to look at a singular event or circumstance from multiple vantage points.
In the end, Boroditsky says, “Language guides our reasoning,” as much as we might like to believe that our language merely gives expression to it.
This week, we’re discussing Hidden Brain’s Watch Your Mouth podcast episode. Take a listen if you haven’t yet had a chance, and share with us in the comments any ideas that were surprising to you, that helped you understand an experience you’ve had with language, or made you want to dig in further.
Also, feel free to discuss with us this TED Talk with Lera Boroditsky on the same topic.
Photo by H4g2, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Will Willingham.
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L.L. Barkat says
I really enjoyed both of these (and it made kitchen-cleaning more fascinating 😉 ).
One of the things I was most intrigued by was the second guest’s mention that women are usually at the forefront of language change. He made no effort to discuss why (or maybe he did and it got edited out 🙂 ), but I wanted to know more… I mean… is this about creativity, acceptable (though subversive in its way) power, more avid social connection, or the fact that women’s brains actually produce more words than men’s anyway (true story, according to some guy interviewed over at Read-Aloud Revival: men’s brains don’t produce as much language)?
I wasn’t so sure about the idea of a lack of math terms meaning less architectural accomplishment. We still don’t know how some of the ancients accomplished amazing architectural feats without trigonometry, but they did.
And the stuff about gendered objects was too cool. Elegant bridges, masculine moons. The stuff of poetry. (And she noted that, too, that art seems to follow language’s cue.)
Will Willingham says
You know, I may have extended that to architecture. She noted it may be a limitation in technological advances and it made sense to me that would also create some constraints in architecture. But I agree, ancient cultures did some inexplicable architectural work. I think the key, rather than particular disciplines of mathematics, might be whether they had the number words. And it seems as though those same societies had very advanced numerical and mathematical systems even of we wouldn’t call them by the same name.
I didn’t touch on the second half of the program with McWhorter, but that too was pretty fascinating. I appreciated what he had to say about the way language evolves and how it needn’t be a tragedy if words take on new or expanded meanings. Literally, not a tragedy.
Say more about which brain produces more language–what does that actually mean and how is it measured?
L.L. Barkat says
I’d say that without numbers you couldn’t send a probe to Mars. Too many calculations needed to accomplish the task. But, you still might be able to conceive of the idea of sending a probe to Mars. And math is often done “kitchen style,” with visual markers instead of numbers, so, again, I think that particular argument of hers seems not quite on track. Even people who have number language cannot parse quantities larger than four or five when they encounter them visually. We with number language also experience those visual experiences as the difference between “one” “two” and “many.” But, yes, we can then count up if we want to know what we’re looking at. Again, though, both those with and without number language would see and experience the differences between “one” “two” and “many” and make decisions based on them (and decisions are thought-based).
Ha! (Literally.)
I’m thinking they measure it with fMRI’s. Not sure. It may have been this podcast where I heard that: https://readaloudrevival.com/82/
Megan Willome says
I’ve listened to “Hidden Brain” before, and this was a great episode.
On the second half of the discussion, I’m reminded of a grammar class I took in college. I was not happy about having to take the class, but the professor approached it from an evolution of language standpoint. One day he wrote a word on the board — “jeet” –and asked us what it meant. None of us had any idea. He said, “I hear all of you saying this every day when you enter this class.” Still, nothing. He added a question mark at the end, “jeet?” Still, nothing, but he had our attention. Then he said it the way we said it, as a contraction of “Did you eat?” “Jeet?” Although that word has not yet entered the dictionary, I still have hope that it will.