How language shapes the way we think

So, I'll bespeaking to you using language ... because I can. This is one these magicalabilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts toone another. So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth asI'm exhaling. I'm making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating airvibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they'rehitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from youreardrums and transforms them into thoughts. I hope.
I hope that'shappening. So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideasacross vast reaches of space and time. We're able to transmit knowledge acrossminds. I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say,"Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantummechanics."
Now, ifeverything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven'thad that thought before.
But now I'vejust made you think it, through language.
Now of course,there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languagesspoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another in allkinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have differentvocabularies, and they also have different structures -- very importantly,different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shapethe way we think? Now, this is an ancient question. People have been speculatingabout this question forever. Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, "Tohave a second language is to have a second soul" -- strong statement thatlanguage crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say,"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality.
These argumentshave gone back and forth for thousands of years. But until recently, therehasn't been any data to help us decide either way. Recently, in my lab andother labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we haveactual scientific data to weigh in on this question.
So let me tellyou about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from anAboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These arethe Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge ofCape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don'tuse words like "left" and "right," and instead, everythingis in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I sayeverything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, "Oh,there's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to thenorth-northeast a little bit." In fact, the way that you say"hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are yougoing?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the fardistance. How about you?"
So imagine asyou're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report yourheading direction.
But that wouldactually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn'tget past "hello," if you didn't know which way you were going. Infact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stayoriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think thathumans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse:"Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales." No; ifyour language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it.There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well.
And just to getus in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want youall to close your eyes for a second and point southeast.
Keep your eyesclosed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there,there, there, there, there ... I don't know which way it is myself --
You have notbeen a lot of help.
So let's justsay the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference incognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group -- verydistinguished group like you guys -- doesn't know which way is which, but inanother group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know.
There are alsoreally big differences in how people think about time. So here I have picturesof my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker toorganize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has todo with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you mightdo it going in the opposite direction, from right to left.
But how wouldthe Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? Theydon't use words like "left" and "right." Let me give youhint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right.When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we satthem facing east, time came towards the body. What's the pattern? East to west,right? So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, itgets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goesthis way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. I'm facing thisway, time goes this way -- very egocentric of me to have the direction of timechase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time islocked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different way of thinking abouttime.
Here's anotherreally smart human trick. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. Well,I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solved it. You went,"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight." You counted them.You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the numberof penguins. This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids. Youlearn the number list and you learn how to apply it. A little linguistic trick.Well, some languages don't do this, because some languages don't have exactnumber words. They're languages that don't have a word like "seven"or a word like "eight." In fact, people who speak these languagesdon't count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So, forexample, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number ofducks, you would be able to do that by counting. But folks who don't have thatlinguistic trait can't do that.
Languages alsodiffer in how they divide up the color spectrum -- the visual world. Somelanguages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words,"light" and "dark." And languages differ in where they putboundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there's a world forblue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but inRussian, there isn't a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have todifferentiate between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy."So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishingthese two colors. When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminatethese colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across thislinguistic boundary. They're faster to be able to tell the difference between alight and dark blue. And when you look at people's brains as they're looking atcolors -- say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue -- thebrains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give asurprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, "Ooh,something has categorically changed," whereas the brains of Englishspeakers, for example, that don't make this categorical distinction, don't givethat surprise, because nothing is categorically changing.
Languages haveall kinds of structural quirks. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languageshave grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine orfeminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sunis feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse.Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do Germanspeakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehowmore male-like? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask Germanand Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here --"bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German,grammatically masculine in Spanish -- German speakers are more likely to saybridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypicallyfeminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're"strong" or "long," these masculine words.
Languages alsodiffer in how they describe events, right? You take an event like this, anaccident. In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase." In alanguage like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, "The vasebroke," or, "The vase broke itself." If it's an accident, youwouldn't say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even saythings like, "I broke my arm." Now, in lots of languages, youcouldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went outlooking to break your arm -- (Laughter) and you succeeded. If it was anaccident, you would use a different construction.
Now, this hasconsequences. So, people who speak different languages will pay attention todifferent things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do.So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, Englishspeakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say,"He did it; he broke the vase." Whereas Spanish speakers might beless likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likelyto remember that it was an accident. They're more likely to remember theintention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but endup remembering different things about that event. This has implications, ofcourse, for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame andpunishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someonebreaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "Thevase broke," even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch thevideo, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more,you will blame someone more if I just said, "He broke it," as opposedto, "It broke." The language guides our reasoning about events.
Now, I've givenyou a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, andit does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects, like we sawwith space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completelydifferent coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deepeffects -- that's what we saw with the case of number. Having count words inyour language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. Ofcourse, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of thethings that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast,right? This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into awhole cognitive realm.
Language canalso have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. These arereally simple, basic, perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all thetime, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tinylittle perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broadeffects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at thesame time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language canshape how you're thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. That's alot of stuff.
And finally, Igave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weightto us -- ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. These areimportant things in our daily lives.
Now, the beautyof linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and howflexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitiveuniverse, but 7,000 -- there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. Andwe can create many more -- languages, of course, are living things, things thatwe can hone and change to suit our needs. The tragic thing is that we're losingso much of this linguistic diversity all the time. We're losing about onelanguage a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gonein the next hundred years. And the even worse news is that right now, almosteverything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies ofusually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. That excludesalmost all humans. Right? So what we know about the human mind is actuallyincredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better.
I want to leaveyou with this final thought. I've told you about how speakers of differentlanguages think differently, but of course, that's not about how peopleelsewhere think. It's about how you think. It's how the language that you speakshapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask,"Why do I think the way that I do?" "How could I thinkdifferently?" And also, "What thoughts do I wish to create?"
Thank you verymuch.
(Applause)