The Language we Speak Determines Our View of The World
As I wrote above, whether the language we speak influences our personality and the way we interpret the world has been studied for years. In this article, I’d like to share with you three main concepts that show that there is a link between how we see the world and the language we speak.
1. Our surroundings and the language we speak
In the case of an aboriginal language called Guugu Yimithirr, in Australia, the speakers of this language don’t use such concepts to describe their surroundings, they use cardinal points. Taking the example of the boy behind a tree, they would say something like: “the child is at the north side of the tree”. This led Deutscher to conclude that the speakers of this dialect develop a type of GPS in their brain as they grow up to constantly identify the cardinal points, thus allowing them to understand and explain what is going on around them.
2. Describing happenings
Athanasopoulos concluded that the English language makes its speakers more inclined to speak in terms of happenings in time, while German doesn’t. For example, “I was sailing to Bermuda and saw Elvis” is different from “I sailed to Bermuda, and I saw Elvis”.
Germans tend to specify the beginning, middle and end of an event, while English speakers usually leave the scope of the action out and focus on the action itself. Looking at the same picture, a German speaker would say something along the lines of “A man is leaving his house and is walking to the store” while an English speaker will simply say “A man is walking”. For more details on this study, click here.
3. Gender and grammar
For example, when the tallest bridge in the world, Viaduct de Millau in France, was inaugurated, the German press described it with words like “floating over the clouds”, “elegance and simplicity” and “charming beauty”. On the other hand, the French press described it as being “huge”, and a “concrete giant”. It’s not a coincidence that the French used strong words while the Germans used words speaking of beauty because the substantive for “bridge” in German is feminine, while it is masculine in French. And because of this, the Germans saw typical feminine characteristics while the French saw masculine ones.
The grammatical gender also changes artistic renditions of intangible things. For example, for 85% of artistic representations of death or victory, the gender coincides with the gender of the substantive in the language of the artist. Germans thus tend to paint death as being a man (masculine substantive) and Russians as a woman (feminine substantive).
I hope you found this article interesting. If you’d like to find out more about how languages affect the brain, I invite you to read our articles on the benefits of being bilingual, the differences of the bilingual brain and how languages seem to have their own characters.
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