How Language Shapes Your Mind

As a linguistics nerd, I love languages. In all of their weird shapes and sizes. Individual languages reflect the way their native speakers think. For example, Pirahã is an indigenous language spoken in the Amazonas which has only 3 numerical terms. They have a word for "one," a word for "two," and a word for "more than two." The Pirahã people asked a linguist studying their speech to teach them to count, so that they wouldn't be cheated when trading with neighboring groups. But after 8 months of daily classes, the Pirahã asked to end their lessons -- not a single one of them could count to 10 or add 1 + 1.

This doesn't mean that they were incapable of comprehending numbers, or somehow less intelligent than other groups of people. The linguist studying the group, Daniel Everett, hypothesized two reasons why his attempt to teach them failed: a cultural reason and a linguistic one. Culturally, the Pirahã are hunter-gatherers, with no need to count, and so they have no experience doing so. Linguistically, they have no vocabulary or structure in their language to understand counting.* If they were raised speaking another language, or in a place where they had a cultural need to understand numbers, they would be able to.

Now, maybe this is a disadvantage for the Pirahã people in a shrinking global setting. But maybe not. I've met people who call this language "more primitive" than others, and that irritates me to no end. You can't just stick a value judgment on another culture. Maybe to the Pirahã people, our language seems like a pain in the ass (and hell, I'd be happy if I didn't need to deal with math ever again...).

But anyway! I'll save the "don't judge" rant for another time. The reason I brought this up, and the reason I think Pirahã is so awesome is because it's one of the best examples of language literally shaping the way we think. I will resist rambling about relativity hypotheses here, and just say that: this means that because you speak English, you think differently.

When I was studying abroad in Spain, I constantly wondered about what kind of a writer I would be if I had been raised speaking Spanish instead.** The longer I immersed myself in the local language (I lived with a host family and went to all of my classes in Spanish, so I spoke English for maybe 10 minutes a day when I called home), the more changes I noticed. I'd be chatting to my mom and forget the word for toaster for a minute. I'd be writing my novel and suddenly the sentence patterns looked all wonky and Latin-esque. To counter-act this, I had to start reading in English for at least an hour before I could even attempt to write (which was actually a good habit to get myself into).

This also got me thinking about what it means to speak English. Yes, it's spoken the world over -- but why? Not because it's intrinsically better than other languages, but because its founding nation (*waves to Britannia*) spent much of its recent reign conquering and colonizing all over the dang place. And throughout their travels, their language did much the same. After all, not many languages can boast a Germanic grammatical structure, but a vocabulary that's almost entirely Latin-based.***

Now, I do wish my culture had done quite a lot less (read: no) pillaging of other countries. Then I would be living somewhere in Ireland or Scotland right now and sipping tea as I argued in a way more awesome accent. Ahem. I digress.

My point was! I love learning other languages, and reading in them, and conversing and listening to native speakers and trying to understand how they think and how it differs from the way that I think. But I can't write in anything other than English, because my brain has been programmed in this language. And I'm okay with it.

Call me biased, but I love how many options English offers. If I want to say "rain," I have a dozen ways to articulate it (downpour, drizzle, flood, cloudburst, monsoon, mist, precipitation, shower, sleet, spate, torrent, volley, cats-and-dogs, etc.). I can write long, flowing, flowery sentences that remind me of the books I've read in Spanish (except, you know, not as good, 'cause Gabriel García Márquez is a fricking genius). Or short and choppy sentences work fine. Okay, I don't speak German. But it sounds choppy. Aside from their gigantic 20-letter-long words.

But I do often wonder how my brain would work if I'd be raised differently. If I spoke a less globalized language, if I spoke a language without a written form... Would I still be a writer? Or a storyteller? Would I still love language as much? I really can't answer that... But it's good food for thought!

* though, I'm assuming he performed this experiment on adult native speakers. I wonder how children in the tribe would have done, if given the same task of learning to count. Children's minds are more plastic, meaning they can form new synapses (like learning a new language and thought pattern) much more easily than adults can.

** probably I'd just write magical realism... :D

*** English: the Frankenmummy of linguistics. P.S. -- and yes, there's a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg aura about this debate, since it makes you wonder what comes first -- cultural necessity or language -- and which one created the other. Personally, I think it goes both ways. Cultural necessity probably formed language in the first place, back when we were monkeys, but our individual language settings don't change once we're grown up, so does that make us pass the language and its specific way of thinking on to the next generation, even if the culture has changed? TOO MUCH FOOD FOR THOUGHT. I will stop nerding out now...