How the language you speak makes you think and act differently
Could the language(s) you predominantly speak shape your thoughts and even your actions?
“English takes a lot more responsibility,” Cihud told me.
I was in Bali chatting with a woman who grew up in Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta. Growing up, she spoke Indonesian in her household. English was taught a bit in school, but she self-taught herself to a fluent level -mainly by memorizing old episodes of the American television show Friends.
Somehow we had gotten on the topic of the differences between our native languages. Cihud gave me an example. In English, we would say that we fell on the ground. Clearly, falling is our fault. We take responsibility for falling.
According to my new friend, in Indonesian people would more likely say what translates to “the ground made me fall.” In this version, the problem isn’t us, but the ground. Unfortunately, I’m not fluent in Indonesian and simply took her word for it. Other Indonesians might even say her interpretation of the languages is inaccurate. Regardless, what she said stuck with me and I began to wonder something: does the language you mainly speak affect how you think and act?
According to a UCLA study conducted by economist Keith Chen, the answer is yes. His hypothesized that languages which grammatically equate the present and future stimulate future-oriented actions.
Chen divided 36 languages into two categories based on whether each language required future events to be grammatically marked or not. For example, English required this and German doesn’t. In English you have to clarify “It will snow tomorrow” whereas in German you would say “It snows tomorrow.”
The study found that people who spoke languages with less distinction between the present and future were 30% more likely to save for retirement and 29% more likely to exercise regularly. They also tended to be less likely to smoke or be obese. This stands true even when comparing people raised within the same country.
As Chen explains in an interview:
There’s a lot of evidence in both cognitive linguistics and in psychology that when your language forces you to pay attention to the fact that a future is different than the present, that subtly makes the future feel a little bit further away than if your language didn’t.
Basically, separating your current and future selves makes it easier to put off activities that will benefit you later on. Some languages encourage this separation while others leave it more up to context. Maybe that’s why I find it so difficult to save money for the future.
Your thoughts can also be shaped by the gender (or lack thereof) of an inanimate object. Some languages, such as English, keep inanimate objects gender neutral. Others, such as Spanish, apply a gender to items. This can affect how they think about objects.
In one study, researchers compiled a list of 24 items that have opposite genders in German and Spanish. Half of the items were masculine and half were feminine. The experiment was conducted in English.
Participants were given the list and were asked to write three adjectives that described each of the objects on the list. It was clear the gender their native language assigned to the items influenced the way they saw each object.
For example, the word “bridge” is masculine in Spanish and the Spanish speakers used words such as “strong” and “sturdy” to describe bridges. German speakers, whose language has “bridge” as a feminine word, used words like “elegant” and “fragile.” Grammatical gendering can influence how you see the world.
Tenses and genders aside, the language you are speaking can still affect how you think and your reactions because of the culture(s) associated with that language. I’ve heard a friend’s father recite numerous times a quote attributed to Charles V:
French is the language of love. English is the language of business. German is the language of war. And Spanish is the language with which to speak to God.
But American English is different from British English. The Spanish spoken in Mexico isn’t the same as the Spanish in Spain. The list continues. The language you’re speaking is only part of what is going on.
While the actual structure of the language you speak may affect your actions, the culture behind it seems to be involved as well.
People’s responses and actions change depending on what language they are thinking and speaking in. Berkeley Emeritus Professor Susan Ervin-Tripp discovered this in her studies.
In one experiment, she had Japanese-American women finish sentences she gave them in both English and Japanese. They asked the questions a few months apart. As you could guess, the answers changed depending on what language they were speaking.
For example when one woman was asked to finish the sentence “When my wishes conflict with my family…” In English, she finished the sentence with “…I do what I want.” In Japanese, the ending was “…it is a time of great unhappiness.” Same woman. Same family. Different responses when speaking another language.
Luckily, learning another language is beneficial to your leadership skills no matter how that second language handles tenses or the cultures associated with it. The study “The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases” asked the question, “Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?”
Not necessarily. Speaking in a language you didn’t grow up speaking requires you to be deliberate and less instinctual. Similarly, trigger words that may instantly arouse a visceral reaction in your native tongue are softened in non-native languages. More careful thinking often leads to different decisions.
As the research team describes:
It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases.
Unsurprisingly, more mindful thinking helps you make better decisions than snap judgments. Talking in another language can force this type of thinking. As if there weren’t already enough compelling reasons to learn another language, it’s now pretty clear that it can help you make better decisions.
None of this means you’re doomed to be irresponsible if you grew up with a language that distinctly separates the present and future tense or if you only speak one language.
The key takeaway here is to be mindful of the words you use, the implications they may hold, and how they may be affecting your actions. The goal isn’t to constantly craft perfect sentences. You don’t need to say a hundred confirmations in front of your mirror each day. All you have to do is think, speak, and reflect.
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