Language Shaping Thought

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A lot of you sent us recently an article that ran in the New York Times called “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”

You remember that one, Grant?

I do, yeah. Guy Deutscher.

Yeah, it was really fascinating.

It was adapted from a book by Guy Deutscher that just came out.

And it talks about the idea that was popular for a while that the language you speak may limit your ability to perceive or describe things.

And that’s an idea that was popular for a while, but now pretty much most linguists have debunked that.

But there’s a really interesting section in this essay where they talk specifically about directional languages or geographic languages.

They’re spoken by some aboriginal tribes and spoken in parts of Polynesia, I think even Mexico, and even in Africa as well.

And the idea is that in these languages, you don’t say things like come to my house by taking a right turn here and then a left turn here and then our house will be the second house on the right.

They say go north and then go east and then our house will be on the eastern side.

And so, for example, Grant, if I were telling you in one of these languages that I wanted you to scoot over in the car seat, I wouldn’t say move over to your right, Grant.

I would say move east.

So giving directions and using the cardinal directions is fairly reasonable.

But when you replace prepositions of orientation like front and behind and back and forth with cardinal directions like north, south, east, west, then you really get into a strange situation.

It seems odd to us because we don’t do that, right?

Right. It seems odd to us, but the weird thing is that people who speak those kinds of languages have what’s described as an almost superhuman sense of direction.

I mean, you can spin them around and around and around, and they’ll still be able to tell you which way is which.

It’s very odd, and maybe this is one place where language does influence the way that you think.

Well, but there’s a subtlety here that I think we need to make sure that we express carefully, which is the myth has long been held, especially outside of academic circles, that the language you speak controls the thoughts that you have.

Exactly.

And this has been almost thoroughly disproven.

I say almost because in linguistics there are no certainties.

There may yet be a language un-chronicled where it does behave that way.

And it’s easy to prove because you have often had the occasion where you wanted to say something and were unable to articulate it.

And now that might be the fault of the speaker. Pretty much any thought can be expressed, but it would just take a long time to say it.

It might take a book to say a simple idea, but you can do it, right? And they’re whole books of words in other languages that we don’t have in our language.

And so therefore people think that, well, they can perceive things differently. But the fact is that we can describe those things.

Right, right. We can describe. It’s just not a pat-set. We don’t have a single word.

A single word. That’s worth exploring a little bit more, too. You don’t have to have a single word for a thing in order for that thought or that idea to exist in your language.

It can be a paragraph. And that thought can exist just fine and is just as valid as that thought existing in another language where they have a single word.

I do think it’s fun to have a single word for it. Yeah, but there’s no, I mean, it might be compact and it might be efficient, but it’s not necessary.

And that leads us to the point here. And this wonderful way of putting this, Roman Jacobson was a linguist who’s quoted by Guy Deutcher in this article.

He says, languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not what they may convey. Another way of putting that is our language allows us to think of things, but it does not oblige us to think of things.

Does that make sense? We’re not obligated to think of north, south, east, and west if our language is built that way.

But we do because that is the way that we express ourselves in that language. Right. Yeah.

Let’s link to this on our website. Well, not only will we link to this article, but we’ll link to some responses to this article and some of the vast discussions about this article.

It’s so exciting to see linguistics treated in a national publication in an academic way with a little bit of popular tone and to really invigorate the conversation about language.

That is exciting too, right? Yeah, lots and lots of discussion.

Lots of response in other newspapers, other magazines, online from the experts and the amateurs, just a huge explosion of talk, and people are trying to figure this out together.

Well, do you have familiarity with one of these kinds of languages or thoughts about it? Call us, 1-877-929-9673, or send your emails.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.