Discussion Board

134 Languages in Contact

each other as Aboriginal Australia, China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, and Russia). Boroditsky illuminates the marvelously diverse ways that lan­ guages and cultures shape the way we think.

In his article "Death by Monoculture," linguistic anthropologist Stephen Pax Leonard bemoans the loss of the Polar Eskimos' language and culture, tying it in part to global warming and, perhaps just as frustrating, a seeming lack of concern from the very pcpulace whose culture is waning. The Polar Eskimos' connection to the larger world via other languages, as well as through the Inter­ net, is understandable, and it mirrors the desires of many people worldwide who arc eager to start lives in new places or bring new places into their own lives.

Noc knowing the "right" language presents more than a metaphorical barrier as James Angelos's article "Passing the Test" demonstrates. Is a re­ quired proficiency in a country's official language a helpful step toward" inte­ gration," or is it a passive-aggressive deterrent to undesirable immigration?

With well over 1,000 languages spoken in India, multilingualism is the norm, yet Reshma Krishnamurthy Sharma's article "The New Language Landscape" reflects both an anxiety to be part of a global economy and a logistical difficulty of maintaining regional languages in the face of India's increasing inter-regional marriages. The answer: The new generation is learning English-the language of rhe former colonizers-exclusively. In "Operation Mind Your Language," Pallavi Polanki sheds light on the demand for English reachers in Afghanistan as a result of the American presence. Indeed, the expansion of English as a global lingua franca has become a worldwide activity-for both those who want co learn and those who want to teach; but not without the justifiable ambivalence that Julie Traves captures in "The Church of Please and Thank You."

As this book goes to print, there aie 6,909 livinglanguages in the world. 1his number, however, is in decline: On average, one language dies every two weeks. At this rate, according to an article in National Geographic, "more than half of the world's roughly 7,000 languages will vanish by the end of rhis century alone."

Access to languages-and the wonder of human cultures rhat shape and are shaped by chem-is increasingly available, even as that access spells, for some languages, their imminent extinction. Global languages such as English, and also Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Hindi, seem to hold greater promise than a speaker's heritage language-the mother tongue, at lease in the present, when economic need can make cultural heritage seem like a luxury. Resolving this conundrum that pits long-term heritage

Boroditsky "How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?" 135

against economic exigency becomes an ethical and cultural dilemma that we as a global community must work out together.

Works Cited Basu, Paroma. "What Happens When a Language Dies?" National

Geographic News, Feb. 2009;web a ccessed Jan. 23, 2013. Lewis, M. Paul, ed. Eth11J!logue: Languages of the World, 16th ed.

Dallas, TX: SIL Internacional, 2009; web accessed Jan. 23, 2013.

Lera Boroditsky

"How Does Our Language Shape

the Way We Think?"

Lera Borodistky, who was born in Minsk in the former Soviet Union, holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University and currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego. She also works in Jakarta, Indonesia, collecting data for her award-winning research on how languages and cul­ tures shape human thought, and is editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. "How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?" appeared in June 2009 in the online "salon" Edge, where individu­ als "seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds ... and ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." In this essay, Boroditsky emphasizes the unique_ly human gift of language, asserting its centrality to human experience. As such, the language we each speak informs how we live our lives, see our worlds, and think about ourselves.

Based on your experience as a language user, what ways do you think indi­ vidual languages might shape the way their speakers think about the world?

H umans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of

languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and

I

140 Languages in Contact

(e.g., "111at was a short talk," "1he meeting didn't cake long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer co talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much," "big," and "little" rather than "short" and "long." Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows chett speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in theit language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely co be confused by distance information, estin1ating chat a line of greater length remains on che test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating chat a container cl1at is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5

· 15 An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of c�urse, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself chat creates these differences in thought and not some ocher aspect of their respective cultures?

One way to answer chis question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) co describe dura­ tion (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble thar of Greek or Mandarin speakers. 1his suggests that pat­ terns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think. 6 In practical terms, it means that when you're learning a new lan­ guage, you're ndt simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadver­ tently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception-our ability to distinguish cdlors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than ochers, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.

To cest whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discrimi­ nate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single vvord that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory

Boroditsky "How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?" 141

distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker co distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.

For English speakers, all tl-rese shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.

Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments-and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access co Ian- 20 guage by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear.

Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far­ reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either mascu­ line or feminine. In many ocher languages, nouns arc divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, includ­ ing classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things."

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get created the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjec­ tive and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sen­ tence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of"my," "was," and "old." These arc the same forms you'd use in speaking of a biological male, as in "my grandfather was