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Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

By GUY DEUTSCHER August 26, 2010, New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in mo
tion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little a
bout the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the
magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemi
cal engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at
Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee W
horf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced
a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of re
ality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand so
me of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”)
and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general publi
c alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power
of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive
understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the
Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired t
hat there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so s
evere that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts w
ere relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of
Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our moth
er tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant a
nd often surprising ways.
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Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother to
ngue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general str
ucture of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its sp
eakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, i
ts speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehens
ible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary e
vidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the pr
esent tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping a
way? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult t
o understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the i
nventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to under
stand, how would you ever learn anything new?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we
must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our
experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a c
rucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in
what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlockin
g the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, t
his is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually o
bliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neigh
bor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell y
ou politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t h
ave the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language
to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform
you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not
mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings sp
ent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of n
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eighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, wh
ereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to
the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I m
ay not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of th
e event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on.
Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in thi
s way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does n
ot mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not
obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to b
e attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other l
anguages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultiv
ated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond la
nguage itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientati
on in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you
to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a wh
ole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Fr
enchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you
have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turni
ps and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that ther
e was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is u
nusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or femi
nine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such
an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system
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will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak Englis
h, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is
too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when
she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings an
d associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists co
mpared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns wh
ose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instan
ce, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspape
rs, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an ap
ple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys,
mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects
on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “m
anly 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 reve
rsed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to variou
s objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them w
anted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, prefe
rred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered lang
uages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct spea
kers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand th
at inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husb
and for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. None
theless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead tho
se with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations
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and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are e
ntirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have
an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gen
der system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, f
ashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge ab
out the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be
surprising if they didn’t.

The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to ligh
t is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you
want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, t
ake the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is
on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the
second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern do
or.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of
coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axi
s and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which
do not rotate with us wherever we turn.

We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but
the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. W
e don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the eas
t.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier an
d more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a ma
p or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly o
n our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.

But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned u
p, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have alway
s taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinate
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s at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that
Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the
position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on car
dinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bi
t to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on th
e southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just nort
h of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the ori
entation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching,
they said that he was “coming northward.”

When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research pr
oject into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; lang
uages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesi
a to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher
to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost o
n some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the
1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the ch
ild’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he cam
e to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasper
ated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the i
nstructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. T
he boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the
landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why did
n’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three ste
ps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this nec
essarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, b
ecause even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its sp
eakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible conseq
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uences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on
the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographi
c directions all the time.

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions a
re at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that ope
rates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would n
ot be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. In
deed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. R
egardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain,
whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sens
e of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “T
here’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as
people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wea
lth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geogr
aphic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from souther
n Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolde
d and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.

How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels spea
kers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position
of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their
own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic langu
age provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated th
at as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or
“east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geogra
phic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies
start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such a
n early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. Whe
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n Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any
more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.

But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend f
urther in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your me
mories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions
as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how i
n his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, an
d their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles t
o the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at t
he loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the re
markable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the sp
eaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, th
ey saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up f
or the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the sam
e story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the
spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat
rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speake
r was facing in the two films.

Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yi
mithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heate
d debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems comp
elling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to me
mory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is t
o imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style
hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opp
osite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom
door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed o
n the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same te
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levision set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have see
n the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite dif
ferent from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the nor
th, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east,
and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic lan
guage will see and remember two different rooms.

It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscro
ssing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is
it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial ori
entation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less
-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speak
er pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he
is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the cen
ter of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mea
n anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through hims
elf, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.

IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? R
ecently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors t
hrough the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the
spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are consider
ed shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language ro
utinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differenc
es in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if thes
e have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall pai
nting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtl
e areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like t
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he finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reportin
g. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a diffe
rent verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you
saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a sta
tement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you as
k a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, h
e would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I
checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of t
hem hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minut
es ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly
about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life
or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions wil
l be amenable to empirical study.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacit
y to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof th
at people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestim
ate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we mak
e on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, im
pulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape o
ur orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their conse
quences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also h
ave a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure
these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstand
ings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all t
hink the same.

Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures
at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the
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Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month
by Metropolitan Books.