So, do we think differently
in different languages?
OK.
(Speaking Russian)
Sorry, it’s like a tongue twister.
That’s a brilliant question.
The Whorfian hypothesis as it’s known,
which is the idea that our language affects our thinking,
has been debated for decades,
even centuries.
There’s a growing amount of experimental evidence
that differences across languages have an influence
on the way speakers of those languages
conceive of the world.
We can see that different languages
structure the world in different ways,
they carve up the various continua
and different types of relations in the world.
The way that different languages chop up the world almost can vary,
and that does actually influence how you see that world.
I think language changes everything about the way you think.
I go into a certain mindset, I sound deeper. I don’t know why.
I perceive situations differently, I react differently.
I think I’m more grounded and more in touch with my emotions in German.
Yeah, it makes me feel more assertive when I’m speaking Dutch
because you just get straight to the point.
It’s not just for talking –
language is for organising an otherwise messy world
into identifiable categories.
It gives us ready labels.
It’s like Lego, you add another word to the word
and that makes it more precise.
Language in French is super gendered –
so everything has a masculine or feminine.
And it just makes everything feel a bit more one or the other.
If you have a word like bridge,
if it’s in a language where it is carrying a masculine gender
then bridges will be described by people slightly differently.
So, it might be its usefulness
or its power might be more associated with the feminine gender
whereas its strength and its size
might be more associated with the masculine gender.
The structure of a language forces us to attend to certain aspects
of reality that are relevant for a language,
at the moment of using that language.
It’s known as the thinking for speaking hypothesis.
There’s evidence that language involves
some kind of image simulation
and that that has a consequence for how we perceive of certain events.
Colour is quite a complex property of a visual world.
Your brain is decoding colour in quite a complicated way.
So you have many languages
that have a term to denote both green and blue
and typically we call this a grue term.
You find this in languages like the Himba, for example,
in the Namibian plains.
In this experiment
we asked participants to look at the colour tile
and then after 30 seconds we show them the full array of colours
and we say, “Now, pick the one that you just saw.”
And it’s a very difficult task if you’re an English speaker
but a Himba speaker can do it like child’s play
because that colour is central to them.
You simply cannot recognise colours that are not easily encoded
in your native language.
I think by virtue of being born into a particular culture
and the language that goes with that culture
we’re almost certainly given to think in a particular way.
The human brain doesn’t work out of the box.
You grow up and you’re growing up learning languages
in particular environments.
By the time you’re dealing with an adult,
you’re dealing with a brain that has been trained up to be an expert
along a number of quite specific dimensions.
There’s actually another very, very good reason to learn a language.
That’s simply to gain another perspective on the world.
You can actually say a lot more, a lot quicker,
in Uzbek than you can in English which is quite interesting.
They used to be nomadic
which meant that the language has to be a lot quicker
because you were speaking to people while moving around
and all this kind of stuff.
But in a sense, language is culture and culture is language.
Speaking a different language is almost a gateway
into a completely different cultural understanding.
(Korean) Do we think differently in different languages?
(Russian) Do we think differently in different languages?
(Portuguese) Do we think differently in different languages?
Cognitive diversity I think is at the core of human nature.
It is probably, if you are looking for universals,
diversity is probably the one true universal of humanity.
