Can language influence how we see, what we feel, and how we think?
Published in Language Lab
5 days ago (Medium.com)
The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” This brings up the question: do we live in different worlds, depending on which language we speak?
Each language provides its speakers with a unique palette of words and grammatical structures, which allows them to materialise their imagination into phrases and texts.
Ask a person who speaks two languages natively to write exactly the same text in both of those languages. Now have the text translated into a third, neutral language. You will see that, even though the same writer described the same events, the two translations are not identical. This is because the palettes which the writer had at their disposal when originally crafting the texts provided them with different tools.
Some concepts, which are elegantly captured in one language, do not exist in others at all. This does not only limit speakers in their ability to communicate, but it also affects how they interpret what is happening around them. For language is the tool we use to give meaning to, well, everything.
I know, dear reader, this all sounds very abstract, but let me boil it down to the essence for you: do we live in different worlds depending on which language we speak? Yes, I, an avid language learner, believe we do.
In this article, I will use colours, emotions and general concepts to exemplify that language is not merely a tool for communication, but that it is at the core of who we are, what we think and how we act.
Colour
We see colour as something objective; the sky is blue, just like 1+1= 2, those are facts, right?
Colour is the scattering of light off an object which we perceive with our eyes. Light rays contain a colour spectrum, which is not visible to the naked eye, except for when the light is separated. This happens when light shines through a prism, a transparent, pyramid-shaped object, but also when sunlight reaches the observer’s eye through airborne water droplets. The full spectrum of colours is then majestically visible in the sky in the form of a rainbow.
The visible colour spectrum begins with red and ends with violet. In between, we find every colour imaginable. Mankind has chosen to divide the spectrum and to name the sections between these divisions. The divisions mark the points at which one colour ends and the other begins; the points where green becomes blue and blue becomes violet.
Different languages divide the colour spectrum in different ways. For the first example of this phenomenon, we will use two languages which are close to each other geographically but are very distinct linguistically: Mongolian and Chinese.
The Mongolian language places a division between the lighter and the darker end of (what we as English speakers would think of as) the blue spectrum; light blue and dark blue are distinct colours in Mongolia, described by the words: цэнхэр (tsenkher) and хөх (khokh), respectively. The Chinese people living over the border do not divide blue, and thus these two Mongolian colours become one in the Chinese language: 蓝 (lán).
Mongolian and Chinese belong to different language families, which means that they do not share a common ancestor. These two languages were designed by different people at different times, which makes distinctions like these understandable. But different perceptions of colours also occur between closely related languages.
Danish and Norwegian are almost identical when it comes to vocabulary and they both stem from a common ancestor; they are about as close as two languages could be, yet, there is a very important distinction. In Danish, there is no word for pink. The Danes call it: lyserød, light red, whereas Norwegian, just like English, makes a clear distinction between red and pink and names the colour rosa.
A colour is only a colour if a group of people deem it to be. Some languages do not even recognise the concept of colour, like the Warlpiri language, spoken in Australia’s Northern Territory. Others only have two colours: dark and light. That doesn’t mean that the scientific phenomenon of colour does not exist for the people speaking these languages, but it does mean that the sensation of seeing colours embodies something different to them than it does to English speakers.
Emotion
Language does not only influence the way we see, but also how we feel.
Emotions are not cultural phenomena; everyone around the world feels joy, anger, love and sadness. We use language to give words to what we are feeling, to make sense of the highs and lows which life presents to us.
Languages are cultural phenomena; they develop on the basis of traditional customs, values and historical nuances, resulting in widely diverging vocabularies, also on the subject of emotions. So, even though we all feel the same things, the language we speak may enable us, or in the worst case prevent us, from labelling those emotions and giving them a dedicated space in our psyches.
Let’s start off with an example which most of you will probably have heard of, intelligent readers that you are.
Schadenfreude is a German word which has been borrowed into English, because there is no native equivalent to it. It describes the feeling of getting pleasure out of someone else’s pain. Although it may seem like a sinister emotion, it has an important function in teaching humans inequity aversion, which is a fancy, psychological term to describe a preference for fairness.
The word “schadenfreude” allows us to make sense of the tingling of joy we experience when we see someone running for a train and the doors close, just as they reach the platform. Without a word to label that emotion, we might just think that we are bad people. But the fact that there is a word for it, gives us the comfort to know that others before us have experienced the same emotion.
Just because I know you appreciate it, here are some more examples of words for emotions which do not have an equivalent in English:
- Dépaysement (French) — the feeling of disorientation one experiences when visiting a foreign country.
- Levensmoe (Dutch) — the sensation of being tired of life.
- Forelsket (Norwegian) — the ecstatic excitement one experiences at the beginning of a relationship.
Gender stereotyping
The practice of classifying traits according to gender has been under fire in recent years; popular opinion is rapidly shifting towards the notion that one should be able to do or be anything they want, regardless of their sex.
Gender is, however, ingrained in many of the languages we speak. These languages label nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter. Some languages have gotten rid of gender distinctions over the decades, but many still use them to this date, like Spanish, Romanian, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew and Russian.
The theory of linguistic relativity states that gendered nouns are not merely a grammatical construct but significantly impact the way in which we perceive objects; when asked, female nouns are granted qualities which are often associated with women, and male nouns are associated with traditionally male characteristics.
One study compared the perception of bridges in German and Spanish. In German, bridge is a female noun (die Brücke), whereas in Spanish it is a male one (el puente). When German respondents were asked to describe a bridge in English (a neutral language in which nouns are not gendered), they did so using qualities which are traditionally associated with femininity, like: beautiful, elegant, fragile and peaceful. Spanish speakers described bridges using adjectives like: big, dangerous, long and strong, which are generally seen as male qualities.
This shows that the grammatical practice of attributing gender to nouns contributes to stereotyping on the basis of traditional views associated with those genders. This is all fine and jolly when it concerns bridges, but it becomes more problematic when those qualities are attributed to professions.
Let’s look at the Spanish language again. In Spanish, the word for dentist is always masculine and the word for nurse is always feminine. If dentists, just like bridges, are associated with typical male characteristics, it might discourage young Spanish girls from pursuing a career in dentistry. And boys who like to take care of others may not consider becoming nurses, because they feel like it would dent their manliness.
Throughout this article I’ve been trying to convey to you, dear reader, that language shapes the world we live in. But of course, we do not use words to feel and grammar to see. All of us see and feel the same thing, regardless of what language we speak.
Language does, however, influence the way in which we interpret what we see with our eyes and what we feel with our hearts. Being polished by cultural and historical tendencies for centuries, languages condition their speakers to view matters from a certain perspective.
The quote with which we started this article: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” definitely holds true, so let me leave you with this piece of advice: learn more languages, or learn more about language. It will not only enrich your world but also expand it in ways which you cannot possibly imagine.
If you made it this far into the article, you must really like reading about language. I know you’ll love my article about the Belgian language border, too. If you like my content, you can subscribe to get notified whenever I publish. Like the images I use? You’ll find more like them at: https://www.isabelsophielobo.com/.
Written by Stef van den Tweel
·Writer for Language Lab
Aspiring author based in the Netherlands, sharing thoughts about language, culture and travel.Follow