Are there really dozens of words for snow in northern cultures? And what did the movie Arrival have to do with how we speak language? Why are Russians better than Americans at distinguishing certain shades of blue? And what does any of this have to do with space or time or gender? And how your language shapes your thinking. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.
Today's episode is about language, and specifically a question about how your language interacts with your thinking. Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know that I often start off talking about how the brain is locked in silence and darkness inside our skulls, and all we ever get are trillions of spikes coming in and running around there, and our perception is constructed from that.
But it's also true that wherever you grow up, whatever spot on the planet you happen to drop in on, you are taught a particular language. Now, does the language you learn tell you what to pay attention to in the world. Does it change your perception of the things around you? And if so, does that mean that if you grew up with a different language you might see the world a little differently. So that's the question we're going to look at today. Does the language you speak
modify the way that you think? So let's start in the eighteen eighties with a young man traveling through northern Canada. His name was Franz Boaz, and he was an anthropologist, and he met and fell in love with the Inuit natives, and he worked to take on their diet and to learn their language, and he ended up writing a book in nineteen eleven called Handbook of American Indian Languages, and in it he reported that they have many many words
for snow. For example, he pointed to the different words for snow on the ground versus snow falling, and there were subtleties like achille kog for softly falling snow and piegnartog for the snow that is good for driving sled. His point is that when you look at English, it doesn't divide the types of snow as finely. So you've probably heard this claim that Inuit natives have lots of
words for snow. And while the public loved this, among linguists, this snowballed into a big debate about whether it was true. Many linguists turned a cold shoulder to this as an urban legend. They said that it came from neglectful study and was then magnified by journalists. Some linguists have gone so far as to label it the Great Eskimo Vocabulary hoax. But the debate about this isn't over. There was a study published a few years ago that suggested Boaz was correct.
The study showed that the Inuit language in Nuktitute does have at least fifty words for snow. These studies authors point out as could be guessed that these aren't just different ways of saying snow, but instead they referenced different types of snow, like wet snow, dry snow, drifting snow, and the paper suggests that Boaz's observations were accurate and that the Inuit do indeed have a rich vocabulary for the stuff that you and I might just call by
one word now. Obviously, it's easily imaginable and understandable that if you're surrounded by snow, you'll develop lots of distinctions for it. All snow is the same to me, or maybe I have snow that's good for skiing or not good for skiing. But if you're surrounded by it all the time, and your hunts depend on subtle differences in it, and your livelihood depends on subtle differences in it, then
you'll get good at making those distinctions. And by the way, cultures who live in warmer climates, like the Aztec speaking their language Nahwattle, use only a single broad term that means snow, and it includes other cold things like ice. So the idea is that our language is shaped by the need for efficient communication. Brains want to come up with words that are exact and informative to other brains in the community, and they want to be able to
produce these with minimal effort. In other words, you don't want to have to use a six syllable word for a word that you use a lot, like dog or cow, but you might use longer, less efficient words for concepts that you don't need to refer too much, like anti disestablishmentarianism or anachronistic or sesquipedalian. So, using snow as an example,
if your community subdivides this into lots of words. That requires more effort to store all these words, but it's worth it if you get a big gain in informativeness. So wherever you find things frequently referenced in language, then you find finer grained categories appearing. And this is how you get communication. So the way that we talk about the world is shaped by our environment and our experiences in the world. For the Inuit, snow is an important
part of their environment and their language reflects this. So this is how language gets shaped. But there's a debate that's been raging in the linguistics community for a century, and that is, if you grow up speaking a particular language, does it make you think differently? In other words, if you grow up in a language with lots of distinctions for snow in the vocabulary, do you actually see snow differently?
When you look out the window. You don't just see falling white stuff, but do you perceive distinctions that would be invisible to me? And does your language shape your thought? Does it restrict or expand what you are able to see? So let's start with the twenty sixteen movie Arrival, which was based on the novella story of Your Life by Ted Chang, and for reasons of not spoiling it if
you haven't seen it, I'll leave out the details. But this movie is about alien ships coming to the Earth and they just hover there and we meet the protagonist played by Amy Adams, because the military can't figure out how to communicate with the aliens, and so she's called in as a linguist. Can she figure out how to communicate with these aliens? And in this story she ends up learning the alien's language, and at the end, once she speaks this new language, she's able to perceive the
world differently. And in fact, some of you may have seen this movie but didn't catch this part of it. The aliens have a different relationship with time, and once Amy Adams learns to speak like they do, she can see time like they do. Now. Although Arrival is a work of fiction, I talked with Head Chang about this, and indeed he based this on this longstanding debate about whether and how your language shapes your thinking, And really
the debate began in Earnest a century ago. There were two linguists who thought about this idea, and they proposed that maybe language isn't just the output of how we think. But instead, when you teach a child language, you're actually shaping how they can think, or how they can see the world, or how their mind can cogitate. These two linguists were named Edward Sapier and Benjamin Wharf, and the idea that language shapes thought became known as the Sapier
Wharf hypothesis. Now we can divide this into the strong version and the weak version of the hypothesis. The strong version states that language determines thought, meaning that the structure of a language actually limits what its speakers can and think about. So if you don't have a word for something in your language, you can't even conceive of it. The weak hypothesis states that language influences thought, meaning that the structure of your language can affect how you think
about the world. I'll cut to the chase here and say that the strong hypothesis that language determines thought has not held up against testing, but there is evidence supporting
the weak hypothesis. As an example that we'll get into in a moment, some languages have different ways of dividing up the color spectrums, so they might verbally distinguish two neighboring colors whereas your language might just use a single word that encompasses both colors, and the evidence suggests that speakers of that other language are better at seeing, better at distinguishing between those different colors, between different shades than
you are because they have words for them. Is this because the language itself is influencing their perception or is it simply because they're more familiar with these colors because they have separate words for them. We'll get back to that momentarily, but either way, they get the difference between these colors better than you do, just as a function
of the language that they speak. Now, the extent of language's influence on your thinking is debated, and in part this is because it's really hard to design good experiments that can isolate the effects of language on your cognition from other factors about your culture and your environment. And also a lot of people are bilingual or multilingual, so their cognitive processes might be shaped by the interplay of multiple languages, so it's not always straightforward to test this.
But that said, our language does seem to play a role in shaping how we think and perceive the world, and that's not so surprising. After all, language provides a
framework for organizing and categorizing thoughts and experiences. The words and labels we use to describe things can influence how we mentally organize the world around us, and our language is what we use to express complex and abstract ideas, and the availability of specific words or phrases can affect how effectively and precisely we can communicate these ideas, or take something subtle, like gendered nouns. A lot of languages use gendered nouns, meaning each object is either a male
or a female. English doesn't have this, but lots of languages do, and there's a lot of study on how that leads speakers to notice different things. Like the word bridge in one language might be male and female in another, and so people who speak those languages will often describe different things about the same bridge, whether it's strong or
it's sleek, depending on their native language. And of course, as I mentioned, the words and concepts that are prominent in your language influence what you pay attention to, like the differences in snow or colors. Now, I recently made an episode on the idea of translating animal language, where we talked about using AI to decode communication between say, dolphins,
or between whales, or between songbirds. And the idea behind that comes out of research showing that all human languages share a similar structure, where the words each sit in a network of meaning related to each other. And you can plot this out and see that languages have a particular shape to them, and so researchers are interested in whether that same shape could be success fully applied to
decoding animal languages. But one of the possibilities I brought up is that an animal language might contain concepts that we don't have any way to understand, and so those parts of the space would be totally uninterpretable to us. And that's because the sensorium of an animal, the kind of signals that can pick up from the world, might influence their concepts what they can think about. And so if we just keep that idea in mind, that's really
the heart of the question that we're asking today. There's been so much excitement in machine learning about the similar structures of human language, but what we're asking today is in what ways are are they different, even if only subtly different, and how might that map onto differences in human thought or experience. Even though we all emerged from the same origins recently, and all have the same brain structure.
Culture and history modify the details of languages. So to understand this better, I called up my colleague, the cognitive scientist Lira Boroditsky, and I asked her, does the language you speak change how you think?
What a great question. Certainly, research in my lab and many other labs over the last thirty years is shown that the structure of the language that you speak changes the way you think, changes the way you see the world, the way you feel, what you pay attention to. And what's emerging from all of that research is this idea that human minds construct not just one cognitive universe, but
actually many thousands of cognitive universes. Right, every language is its own little inner cosmos, and every language gives you a different perspective not just on the physical world, but also on the incredible complex invented worlds that we humans create that allow us to think about complex things like our inner universes or the cosmos, or the kinds of things that allow us to play chess, or compose symphonies
or do really high level mathematics. Every language is its own little set of tools for creating those very complex ideas and ends up with very different complex ideas as a result.
So you grew up speaking Russian, Yeah, so give us a sense of the differences between English and Russian and what that might lead to in terms of thinking about something different.
Sure, I can give you a couple of basic differences. Russian is a language that has grammatical gender, so every now and is masculine or feminine, and so people who speak languages like that end up actually assigning some gender stereotypically gendered properties to things that don't have gender, like toasters or gloves or plants, things like that. Russian, in the perceptual realm makes an obligatory distinction between light blue
and dark blue. So things that English calls blue for Russian speakers, the light part of the blue spectrum is gulaboy and the dark part is seeny, and you have to call them by different names. They are just two different color words like blue and green and English. And what we find is that people who speak languages like this actually do make a sharper distinction perceptually between those two colors, and very early on their brain and starts
treating those two colors as categorically different. So if you're looking at the brain of say a Greek speaker Russian speaker, looking at a stream of colors, when it changes from the light blue category to the dark blue category, the brain gives us very fast surprise response like Ooh, something categorically has shifted. But if you're looking at the brain of an English speaker where they're all just blue, then you just get this nice, smooth function. The brain isn't
alarming at saying, oh, you've changed something. So that tells us that language sneaks into even the very finest, little tiny decisions that your brain is making about the perceptual world. Just looking at colors is not such a hard conceptual task, but even there, language is interfering.
And what about examples across cultures with for example, time and space.
Yeah, so both of us are very interested in how people think about and across lots and lots of cultures. What we see is people think about time using ideas from space, so they're using metaphors, they borrow spatial representations to think about time. But the way that space is used to talk about time and to think about time differs from culture to culture. Let me give you some examples. So in English we talk about the best being ahead
of us and the worst being behind us. So the future is in front of us and the past is behind. And we used to think maybe this is a biological necessity, right, because of course we walk forwards, not backwards. We have eyes on the front of our heads, not on the backs of our heads. But then it turns out there are lots of cultures that put the past in front and the future behind, and for them that's the more natural way, they say, because of course you know what
has already happened. The past is no and it's manifest, that's why it's in front of your eyes, whereas the future is unknown. So what humor is for us to think that the future is in front of ours, to think that we can see it. To them, that seems absurd. There are differences in how people think about time, even based on how their language is written. So, for example, if your language is written from left to right, events
unfold in your mind from left to right. If your language is written from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew, that events will unfold from right to left. Some languages have a strong vertical dimension for time, so for example, in Mandarin, the past is up in the future is down, and so Mandarin speakers have this strong vertical orientation for time.
My favorite example comes from some work that I got to do in Aboriginal Australia, and so there's this group called the kook Tire that I had a chance to work with with my colleague Alice Gabee. And in kook Tire you don't use words like left and right to talk about space. Instead everything is in north south east
west space and really everything. There are a lot of languages like kuk Tire where you would even say, oh, there's an ant on your north northwest leg and of course, well, if your body that's no longer than north northwest leg, you have to recalculate. The way you say hello and coop Tire is to say which way are you going? And the answer should be something like north northwest in
the far distance, how about you? So even to get past hello, you have to be oriented, and this is very different from the way most Western folks orient themselves. Most of the time we're thinking about space with respect to our bodies, not with respect to the landscape. So for me, the question was how do folks like this think about time. If it's true that we use ideas from space to think about time, but these folks think about space with respect to the landscape, how do they
think about time? So I made up a very simple task. I have a set of picture cards. I give them to you, and they might be, say, pictures of my grandfather at different ages, and I just say, put these in the correct order, and so you lay them out on the ground in some order that you think is correct. But what I'm interested in is what is the orientation with respect to your body or the respect to the landscape.
And what we find is if a cook tire speaker is sitting facing south, they'll put the cards out from left to right. If they're sitting facing north, they'll put the cards out from right to left. If they're sitting facing east, they'll put the cards out coming towards their body. So if you do a little mental rotation in your mind, think about what the pattern there is. Well, it's from east to west right, It's always in the same direction in the landscape, it just goes in different directions of
the respect to the body. And as an English speaker, I look at that and they think, oh, how strange time is flowing in different directions for them, depending on which way they're facing. But another way to think about that is no, actually time is always flowing in the same direction for them east to west landscape. And it's so strange that for me, time shifts every time I move my body right. So if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. If I'm facing this way,
then time goes this way. If I'm facing this way, then time goes so ego centric of me to make the dimension of time change anytime I turn so to me, that's a really wonderful example about the potential also of the human mind, because in order to be able to organize time that way, you have to be oriented in a way that we used to think humans couldn't be oriented. We used to think it was beyond human capability to be able to keep track of your orientation at all times.
And it turns out not only was it not impossible, it's not even that hard. You just have to try. It's just a mental practice that you start, and in these cultures and cultures like the kouk Tire, it's constantly
reinforced socially because you have to use the language. The language requires you to be oriented, and so to me, this is always a really putent reminder of how much more is available for our brain to do that is not just what we're used to, but what we could do if we just try out a couple things.
How do you suppose it got started in the Koukti. One possibility is that it just gets passed along from generation to generations, so people have to become very aware of the landscape. Another possibility is that there's some genetic things, such as they have slightly more magnetite in their inner ear and they're more sensitive to the orientation of the planet. I'm just curious how you think about why that happens in some cultures and why it doesn't happen in others.
Yeah, so it happens in culture all over the world, and it happens this property of using absolute space instead of terms like left or right happens in all kinds of different environments. So sometimes it's people who live in dense forests, and sometimes it's people who live in barren deserts, and sometimes it's people who live in mountains, and sometimes it's seafaring people, and sometimes it's landlocked people. So you
can kind of find it in every geographical environment. So I don't think the geographical environment is the best predictor of this. I don't think we have any evidence that there's a genetic component, and I can give you a
couple of anecdotal reasons for it. One is, if you look at people living in the same community, let's say, in the same village where they're bilingual or some people are stronger, and one language that's an absolute orientation language, in another language that's a relative left right orientation language. The way people stay oriented in the way they gestured to depends on the language that they're dominant in, not
on you know, anything else. They're all related, they're all part of the same village, as part of the same genetic pool, right, And so you can find even within a very very small genetic community, variation based on language exposure rather than on geography or other things. And in my own experience, you know, I spend a lot of time outside. I love to go hiking, and i go mushroom hunting, and I'm constantly traveling and finding myself in
new places. It would have been extremely useful for me to develop an ability to stay oriented as well as the kuktai or stay oriented. There have been lots of times in my life where it would have been really useful, And the first time that I really felt it was when I was spending time in this community. Because when you don't know which ways which they're people treat you like you're stupid, but because you kind of are by
local standards, right. And I remember after about a week, I was walking along and suddenly I saw this window open up in my mind and it was a bird's eye view of the landscape, and I was a little red dot that was just traversing the landscape. And as I turned the thing, this window, this map stayed locked on the landscape and it just turned in my mind
and it seemed to happen automatically. And as soon as I saw it, I thought, oh, well, this makes it so easy, Like if this thing keeps working, if this automatic little widget that my brain just grew keeps working, it'll be trigger to be oriented. And then I kind of sheepishly told someone there, I said, you know, this weird thing happened. I said, saw it from a bird's eye view and it rotated in my mind. And they said, well,
of course, how else would you do it. So I noticed it developing within my brain within the course of a week because of the intense social pressure to try to appear not so useless and not so not so stupid to the people around me, even though it would have been useful lots of other times in my life.
Yeah, okay, So getting back to language, the language that you speak, there seems to be some structuring of how you think or what you're able to think. How do we know that language is a causal factor there, that the language actually structures how you think.
That's a great question because whenever you compare to groups of people who speak different languages and you say, well, look they think differently, what you're showing is a correlation because there could, of course be lots of other things that are underlying causes that are not the language. And so the way we try to attack that very directly is in the lab. We bring people in and we teach them new ways to talk about time. So we teach them new ways to talk, new metaphors, and then
we see if we have shifted the way that they think. So, if you come in and let's say you're an English speaker, I try to teach you vertical ways to talk about time. So now in this version of English, you're going to say Monday is above Tuesday, and Tuesday is above Wednesday,
or the reverse mondays below Tuesday, Tuesday's below Wednesday. After doing that for a little while, even just a few minutes of just getting it down, making sure that you really understand the metaphor, what we see is people start to develop an implicit mental timeline that's vertical and in the direction that the metaphors go. And we can measure that implicit timeline with clever little experiments that and tasks
that we set up in the lab. So that's a very clear sign that changing the way that people talk, changing language very quickly changes the way people think. You can teach people new ideas by introducing a new metaphor, for example.
And at what age do you see these kind of effects in children?
Oh? Well, with the grammatical gender example that I showed you that I told you early on, you see even quite young kids, like five year old kids starting to think that if you're going to make a movie about toasters, for example, the toasters should have boy voices or girl voices, depending on the grammatical gender in the language. But with more basic perceptional things like differentiating different sounds. That starts
to happen in infancy. So different languages make use of different sound contrasts, and human infants are born ready to be able to discriminate all the possible sounds in human languages, but some of those turn out not to be useful because their language doesn't actually make use of those contrasts. And you see those abilities start to fall away in
the very first year of life. So if you compare relatively newborn infants that are growing up, say in a Japanese speaking environment in an English speaking environment, they're equally sensitive across the contrast range. But if you compare them at one year of age, you start to see that some contrasts have fallen away, and they're different ones for different language environments.
God, and are people swayed by the framing of language that they receive, for example, in the context of the legal system.
Oh well, obviously our lawyers would hope so because they want you to They want you to give them lots of money so that they can continue to sway them. Yeah, language is very powerful in shaping how we construe situation, even a very simple situation let's say there's an accident someone breaks a oz. There are lots and lots of ways to describe that situation in language, and depending on how I frame it, if I say he broke the vaz, or I say the vaz broke, or to him it
so happened that the vaz broke. All of those lead people to think to construe the situation in different ways, to focus more on who's to blame. In our experiments, people both blame people more and require more money if you describe as a situation a situation as he did it, as opposed to it happened. And this is true even if they can see the video themselves.
Right.
So if we show them an example of a crime against a balloon, for example, someone popping a balloon or breaking of oz, people will both blame the person more and want more money if we describe the situation as he did it.
So that was Lera Boroditsky, and she studies how our language and our brains are in a feedback loop with one another, such that the language you speak can modify what you are sensitive to, like if you have different words are blue, or how you think about space and time. So fundamentally, there are still many open questions about this. The long version of the Sapier war hypothesis has been largely dismissed, but there are a lot of excellent questions
and possibilities about the weak hypothesis. As you know if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, my obsession is about the way that we have different internal worlds on the inside, with each of us living on our own planet. Whether that's the way that we see colors, or whether we have synesthesia or word a version or a fantasia, or one hundred other measurable differences about our internal reality, we all end up having a slightly different
experience of reality. And so while there are plenty of remaining questions about language and the extent to which it modifies your thinking, the work of Lira and other linguists and cognitive scientists gives us yet another way to zoom in on some of these questions and get a better of the differences between how each of us sees the world. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussions, and I'll be making episodes sporadically in which I address those. Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.