Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

I truly enjoyed reading the article, Does Your Language Shape How You Think? by Guy Deutscher in the New York Times Magazine, because the linguist author shows how different languages appreciate color, space, directions and gendered nouns and how these differences may effect the way we see and experience the world. As a speaker of seven languages and having studied three others, I know that my navigation of the Tower of Babel through my linguistic compasses forces me to think of my life in different ways. In English, I say, “I am hungry”. In French, “I have hunger.” These are two fundamentally different ways of thinking about one’s need to eat. Deustcher shows how much more profound linguistic differences can make us feel.

My question is: how do multilingual people see and feel the world? Do we get confused by the confluence of various directions to which our tongues point? I catch myself sometimes using the wrong sentence structure in a language when I am tired, but not everyone who is a polyglot is even consciously aware of the variations of speech patterns they have when they traverse from one language to another.

Below are his concluding words showing how important it is to open up one’s world and learn about how to think in another tongue. If we all did that, would the Tower of Babel still exist? Or could we all learn to understand one another?

“The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have 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 misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think 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 Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.

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