How language you speak shapes the way you perceive world

Introduction

My duck, Kenny loves to ride on elephant's back when fighting with my neighbor's laser zebras.    You've probably visualised a weird scene just by seeing some marks on your screen. Language either in verbal or literary form has played a vital in human civilization. It's a magical ability we humans have to transmit our thoughts & ideas across minds just through some tones, hisses & puffs. Imagine where we would be without language to pass our existing knowledge to our next generations.

But language seems to have another important role than just expressing ideas. Researchers have found that people who speak more than one language are likely to have a different personality when switching across languages. There are around 7000 languages and they have different vocabularies, grammar structures and tones. 

Consider the sentence "Stark had lunch with the king". This single line alone can reveal some of the differences in structures of languages. If you're to say this sentence in Russian, you must reveal the gender of the noun (Mr.Stark or Mrs. Stark). In Turkish you must include additional information if you saw it with your own eyes or heard about it. 

This shows how each language reveals different details of the same event. And there comes the question;

• Do speakers of different languages comprehend their experiences differently? 
• Can you think of something which your language doesn't have a word for?

Language and color

Our perception of colour is not only related to the colours we see but also to the words we give to colours. Julius Davidoff, a researcher travelled to Namibia to conduct an experiment with the Himba tribe. The Himba do not have a separate word for blue, for them blue is a variant of green. 

 

When shown a circle with 11 green squares and 1 blue square, it was hard for them to distinguish between green and blue. Those who could distinguish took much longer and made many mistakes compared to English speakers. 

But the Himba have more words for variants of green than English speakers do. When shown a circle with green squares with one slightly different shade, the Himba could easily do it compared to English volunteers. 

Can you do it? Give it a try. 

Here it is

Comprehending same event differently

"Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory” in the first experiment psychologists showed 45 American students some footage of car crash. Later, the participants were asked to estimate the speed the cars were going at. The catch is that the wording of the question was altered to each group. 

A group was asked, "About how fast were the cars moving when they contacted each other".Others also received the same question but the word 'contacted' was replaced by 'hit/smashed'.

The results were surprising. Even though all of them had watched the same footage, depending on the word used overall estimates changed. Participants who were asked "About how fast were the cars moving when they hit" were more likely to estimate higher speeds than others. 

Remembering different things from the same event

In their second experiment, a week later all the participants were asked to answer if there was any broken glass as a result of accident in the footage. The group who heard "About how fast were the cars when they hit" had a higher 'yes' answers than others. Those who heard "smashed" were even higher. But the footage had no glass at all. 

In another experiment “Who dunnit? Cross-linguistic differences in eye-witness memory” Borodistky and Fausey examined 113 English & 109 Spanish speakers' descriptions of intentional and accidental events, as well as their memory to casual agents of these events. 

Spanish speakers, maybe because of their grammar, are more likely to use non agentive (example: The vase broke) language to describe accidental events unlike English speakers who used agentive language (he broke the vase). In case of intentional events both of them used only agentive language. 

When it came to intentional events, speakers of English and Spanish remembered the agent of the event (i.e who did it) equally well. But in accidental events English speakers remembered the agent better than the Spanish speakers. 

"These findings suggest that our eye-witness memories for events may be influenced by the languages we speak. Speakers of different languages remember different things about the same events. Whether or not we are likely to remember who did what appears to pattern with how such events are normally described in our language community." -Boroditsky and Fausey 2011.

Impact on court judgements

This might seem very insignificant to us but slight phrasal replacements in English affected judgements in legal issues. 

"The linguistic contrast between agentive and non-agentive frames has the potential to have serious real-world consequences, especially in legal contexts. For example, in the 197,745 trials held between 1674 and 1913 at London’s central criminal court (Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 2009), cases with the agentive phrase “broke it” in the court records resulted in a guilty verdict more often than did cases with the nonagentive phrase “it broke” (76% and 70% guilty, respectively), with similar patterns for other consequential actions such as “burned it” versus “it burned” [77% and 57% guilty, respectively. In the most serious of cases (when the charge was “killing”), the transitive/intransitive contrast as marked by different verbs also predicted verdicts. Saying “killed” resulted in more guilty verdicts than did saying “died” [65% and 56% guilty, respectively]" ---Borodisky and Fausey. 

Describing or looking at things differently

As a part of a study in 2010, Spanish and German speakers were asked to describe a bridge. 

Spanish speakers used words like:

• Long
• Strong
• Big

But German speakers used

• Elegant
• Beautiful
• Useful

The Spanish word for bridge is "el puente" which is masculine and the German word for it is "die Brücke", a feminine word. Therefore, German speakers subconsciously use feminine adjectives to describe a bridge and Spanish speakers masculine. 

When the same test was repeated again with a key responses flipped. This time Germans used masculine adjectives when Spanish speakers used feminine adjectives.