“A different Language is a different vision of life,” said Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, director of La Dolce Vita. But is one language’s vision so different from another? In a recent article from The Wall Street Journal, Stanford University psychology professor Lera Boroditsky explored how languages might shape the way we think.

The Structures Built in Our Mind

Language is our everyday tool to communicate with others. So how does that constant use shape the way we think ourselves? Language is the framework that supplies our understanding of the world around us and what we should be paying attention to.

Time marches on, or flies, depending on our schedules. But in some languages that progression is left to right and in others it seems to move right to left, depending on which way we are accustomed to reading. In other languages it is down to up, or up to down, or front to behind, or even east to west. New cognitive research shows that your way of organizing time depends on the language you grew up using. Does that orientation make a difference in the way we behave?

And what’s time without space? If you stop the average Anglophone urbanite and ask the way north, most would have to pull out a cell phone to set you in the right direction. But in Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal Australian language, one can’t even begin a conversation without knowing exactly what direction they are facing at the moment of conversation.

Sex too, naturally. Or rather, gender. In English, I can talk about my friends without applying gender labels, if I don’t want to. No can do in Spanish or other Romance languages. You can’t not say it. Amigo and amiga are the choices you have.

These linguistic twists are often trivial, but can sometimes have grave consequences. Boroditsky’s article mentions a Stanford study by Caitlin Fausey. In the study, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese could all recall the agents of intentional actions, and the English speakers could recall the agents of Accidental Actions. However, the Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn’t recall the agents of accidental actions as well as the English speakers.

All three languages will mention the agent in intentional actions, but only English will mention the agent when it comes to accidental actions (e.g. “Pete broke the vase.”). In Spanish and Japanese, talking about an accidentally broken vase doesn’t have to mention the person who did it at all.

These not-so-obvious differences in expression between languages lurk in every sentence we translate, and careful, non-machine expertise is required to correct and mitigate the impact of these grammatical difference. Message: Careful translation required!

Getting Things Done in Any Language

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