More Than Words: How Language Influences Our Decisions
People frequently ponder what life would be like if they could not see or hear, but they don’t often consider how devastating life would be without language, the number one way of connecting.
Language shapes and impacts our thoughts and perceptions, which, in turn, shape our worldviews.
But not everyone speaks the same tongue. Language and dialects vary throughout nations and can reflect differences in cultures, attitudes and social norms.
Understanding the role language plays in human interaction can help us grasp where cultural differences stem from.
Some languages have a strong focus on gender. French and Spanish commonly assign feminine or masculine endings to nouns and object pronouns, such as “la mesa” (the table, feminine noun and pronoun) or “un livre” (a book, masculine noun and pronoun).
This can also be seen in the Hindi language.
In an article for the BBC titled The Subtle Ways Language Shapes Us, Nayantura Dutta explains how a person’s gender influences the speech used to address them.
“While learning Hindi, a gendered language, I realized that I was expected to show respect to men, sometimes more than women. I wasn’t allowed to speak to my male and female classmates in the same way,” Dutta said. “With men, I was taught to use the honorific plural (Aap kya kar rahe hain? over Tu kya kar raha hai? to ask ‘What are you doing?’), but could only show respect to women using feminine endings (Aap kya kar rahin hain? over Tu kya kar rahi hai?).”
In India, women must use the right honorific when speaking to men because men are seen as superior.
This attitude of holding men to a higher standard is also reflected in how Indian women have struggled to reduce domestic violence and achieve gender equality.
Growing up in a culture with a language that emphasizes gender in everything could assign stereotypes to what it means to be feminine or masculine and influence an entire culture’s attitude toward men and women.
Language, specifically sentence structure and grammar, also affects our perception of time.
People who speak English typically view time horizontally, moving left to right, while individuals who speak Mandarin view time vertically, with the past being up and the future moving down.
Moreover, some languages don’t conjugate their words in terms of past, present or future, which influences people’s daily decisions.
Behavioral economist Keith Chen studied the relationship between language and economic behavior.
He found that people who spoke languages that lack strong grammatical distinctions between the future and the present, such as German, Mandarin, Japanese, Dutch and Scandinavian, viewed the future as the present and were more likely to be proactive. They were 31 percent more likely to save money and accumulated 39 percent more wealth by retirement.
On the other hand, speakers who communicated with languages that clearly distinguish the future from the present, such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, were more detached from the future and were more likely to delay in taking action.
Linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists continue to study how speech shapes our perceptions, attitudes and decisions.
Recognizing the role of language in our lives can help us understand why we think the way we do.
