Do we think differently in different languages? | BBC Ideas

so do we think differently okay-dokey use a car Magruder sorry it's like a tongue twister that's that's a boring question the Whooper hypothesis as it's known which is the idea that our language affects our thinking has been debated for decades even centuries there's a growing amount of experimental evidence that differences across languages have an influence on the way speakers of those languages conceive of the world you can see that different languages structure the world in different ways they carve up the various continued and different types of relations in the world the weather different languages chop

up the world almost can vary and that is actually influenced how you see that world I think language changes everything about the way you think I go into a certain mindset sound deeper than the way I perceived situations differently I react differently I think I'm more grounded and more in touch with my emotions in German yeah it makes me feel more assertive when I'm speaking Dutch because you kind of just get straight to the point it's not just for talking language is for organizing an otherwise messy world into identifiable categories it gives us ready labeled

it's like Lego you add another word to the word and that makes it more precise language and French is super gendered so everything has a masculine or feminine and it just makes everything feel a bit more one or the other if you have a word like bridge if it's in a language where it is carrying a masculine gender then bridges will be described by people slightly differently so it might be its usefulness or its power might be more associated with the feminine gender whereas its strength and its size might be more sort of associated with

the masculine gender the structure of a language forces us to attend to certain aspects of a language that are certain aspects of reality that are relevant for a language at the moment of using that lang it's known as the thinking for speaking hypothesis there's evidence that language involves some kind of image simulation and that has a consequence for how we perceive of certain events color is quite a complex property of our visual world your brains decoding color in quite a complicated way so you have many languages that have a term to denote both green and

blue and typically we'll call this a GRU term you find this in languages like the Himba for example in the Namibian Plains in this experiment we ask participants to look at the color tile and then after 30 seconds to show them the full array of colors we say not pick the one that we just saw and it's a very difficult task if you're an English speaker but a human speaker can do it like child's play because the font color is central to them you simply cannot recognize colors that are not easily encoded in your native

language I think by virtue of being born into a particular culture and the language that goes with that culture we are almost certainly given to think in a particular way the human brain doesn't work out of the box you grow up and you're growing up learning languages in particular environments so you've got you know by the time you're dealing with an adult you're dealing with a brain that has been trained up to be an expert along a number of quite specific dimensions there's actually another very very good reason to learning language and that's simply to

gain another perspective on the world there you can actually say a lot more a lot quicker in aspects you can in English which is quite interesting it used to be nomadic which means the language has to be a lot quicker because you're speaking to people while moving around and all this kind of stuff but in a sense language is culture and culture is language speaking a different language is always kind of gateway into a completely different culture understand we got her on or think Agartala kayo droogies musica we do memorable when summer she French in

order as linguist cognitive diversity I think is at the core of human nature it is probably if you're looking for universals I bet it is probably the one true Universal of humanity thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe and click the bail to receive notifications for new videos see you again soon