Your language shapes the way you perceive the world

Heyo readers.  A second blog post!  I’m going to be trying to post more often, especially because we might have to do one comic update a week here for a bit while life is hectic and uber-busy for our artists down in Argentina.  Seba thinks he’ll be able to do two posts a week, but I thought I’d just let you know in advance we might not make the scheduled dates very well for the next couple of weeks.

Anyways, my wife shared a really awesome article with me the other day, about the effect on language on our perceptions.  In case anybody forgot, I’m in medical school, studying anatomy and physiology and stuff all the time, so I really enjoy reading about all sorts of other interesting topics to balance the overwhelming amount of medical knowledge being thrown at me.  In fact, I probably enjoy my diversions too much, as sometimes I care more about them than studying 🙂

I’d really recommend you read the article, because it’s quite interesting, but if you just see it and think “TL;DR” I’ll sum it up for you.  Basically, the posits that our languages don’t necessarily control and limit the way we think (not having a future tense doesn’t mean we can’t think or talk about the future, and not having a word for something doesn’t mean you can’t understand it), but that it does affect it, and in some cases, direct the way we view the world.

He gives a couple of sweet examples that made me laugh/smile in excitement.  The first had to do with assigning gender to inanimate objects.  In English, basically everything is just an ‘it’ unless it has some genitalia to prove otherwise.  Some few things, like boats, get to be ‘shes’ for some reason, but that’s the exception, not the norm.  In many of the Romance/Latin languages of Europe, however, everything has a gender.  They also don’t always agree on the gender of the object, either.  Spanish and French provide good example of this, and how it shapes the way we perceive things.

From the article:

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

That’s just cool.  Because of their language, not only do French and Spanish people (and people who speak similar languages) have to constantly be aware of the gender of everything as they speak, it also changes how they view things.  Since the word bridge is male in Spanish and female in German, Spanish speakers described them with more “manly properties” like strength, while German speakers used more “feminine” descriptions like elegant and slender.

That alone made me kind of wish I was a linguist, but the next big example from the article blew my mind.

In the majority of the languages of the world, we have words to describe the locations of things with respect to our bodies and our line of sight.  Things are to the left, right, in front, beneath or above us.  We can describe things by their geographical relationships (north, south, east and west), but we often don’t.

We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.

But, there are some languages, mostly among more aboriginal peoples, that don’t have the egocentric words for describing things, but primarily rely on the geographic coordinates.

Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

That is totally cool.  These people grow up speaking this way, to the point that as adults, they always know which way is north/etc. even when blindfolded and spun around.  It is completely ingrained into their worldview that they have to constantly be aware at every moment of the day which direction is what.

I kind of wish I had such awesome internal compass skills.  I do like being able to call my right hand my right hand, and not my south hand (as it currently is), and then my east hand when I turn.  That would suck.

This sort of stuff makes me wonder what sort of things are coded into my worldview by the language I speak.  Does anyone from our international audience have any interesting insights into how language shapes the way they perceive the world?