A lot of people underestimate the power of language. They may see it as solely words on a page, or a group of syllables that only carry literal, surface-level meaning. However, I view language differently.
Language is something that our brains appear to be innately designed to process and comprehend. Making sounds is one of the first things that babies can do when they are born, and after not too long those sounds turn into grammatical words and sentences, seemingly effortlessly and without the need for ‘formal education’. Hence, ever since a very young age, language is something that humans use on a daily basis to express their own thoughts and emotions as well as understand others’ ideas. The impact of this is that certain aspects of the world around us are actually engrained in our brains in specific ways, sometimes without us even realising it.
Firstly, perception. Languages have the ability to change how we see our surroundings. For example, Lithuanian has two words for the colour “blue”, while Norwegian only has one. Could this impact the way people from these two backgrounds view colours? Well, a study highlights that monolingual Lithuanians were quicker to recognise different shades of blue than monolingual Norwegians. Moreover, Lithuanian-Norwegian bilinguals were able to distinguish between the shades of blue faster when they were thinking in Lithuanian rather than in Norwegian. So, language does not simply affect how we refer to different colours, but actually changes how we perceive them. This idea extends far beyond just colour, and there are many other areas of our daily lives that may be perceived differently because of languages.
Next, culture. There are languages with words that represent specific cultural concepts or beliefs that cannot really be translated in a way that fully captures the desired meaning. For example, the French word “dépaysé” literally means being forced to leave your country, but instead has come to represent a “fish out of water” feeling due to a change in surroundings, which can be either positive or negative. Another example is the fact that Chinese has so many idioms related to family. This is because family and concepts such as filial piety are central pillars of Chinese culture. Therefore, language and culture are heavily intertwined, and someone can often gain insight into a specific culture by examining its language.
Lastly, values and worldviews. In English class at school, I had the opportunity to read “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”. In the text, Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses how although English does not use human pronouns to describe most parts of the natural world, there are some languages such as Potawatomi which do. This linguistic difference may reflect a broader variance in the cultures’ and societies’ relationship to nature and how much they value it. A quote that especially stood out to me is: “If a maple is an it, we take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.” A simple change in words or language can cause us to reconsider an entire being’s value, capturing just how powerful language truly is.
All in all, language is so much more than a method of communication, and learning about its strength can allow us to think critically about how to best use it to foster connections with others and express our identities more authentically.
Credit: Garrett Syverson (Medium)
Works Cited
Haugan, Idun. “Language Affects How Quickly We Perceive Shades of Colour.” Norwegian SciTech News, 15 July 2024, norwegianscitechnews.com/2024/07/language-affects-how-quickly-we-perceive-shades-of-colour/. Accessed 31 Oct. 2024.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “Learning the Grammar of Animacy.” Anthropology of Consciousness, vol. 28, no. 2, Sept. 2017, pp. 128–34, https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12081.
“More than Words: How Language Affects the Way We Think.” GoFLUENT, 13 Mar. 2020, www.gofluent.com/us-en/blog/how-language-affects-the-way-we-think/. Accessed 31 Oct. 2024.