The Power of Language

How does language affect the way you think?

“The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter.” –Guy Deutscher (Does Your Language Shape How You Think?)

Sociology is the study of society and how it affects an individual. We learn things from our surroundings. Whether it be form the media, our parents, or school most memories and impressions are unable to be erased. It makes all the difference when we learn these habits from an early age. We learn things and automatically become ethnocentric in our views of the world. We see the world from our own lenses because we are usually only familiar with one dominant way of life. It is not anyone’s fault that communication is difficult between cultures. Barriers like family expectations, gender roles, dress, and language cause culture’s to view the world differently.

 

Language is a special kind of thing. You’re able to communicate how you feel through your words. You can talk to people you care about and tell others you’re frustrated by using your knowledge of language and how different words can be more symbolic than others. In the article, Does Your Language Shape How You Think? Guy Deutscher discusses the impact one’s mother tongue has on the way they view several different societal aspects. He says, “New research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.”  Any type of cultural practice is going to instill habits among its members, but language is very powerful.  Up-and –coming research is showing that language directly affects cultural views and routine.

For example, Deutscher talks about how in languages such as Spanish and French the gender of all people is specified within their word they are speaking with.  When saying neighbor there are two versions, each one for a different gender. So the French and Spanish are not ever searching for the gender of an individual, unlike Americans. These foreign languages oblige the speakers to mention the gender.

Also, most European languages contain built in gender in their inanimate objects. These grammatical genders shape whether these cultures view the subject, such as a fork, as masculine or feminine. Deutscher says, “Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers- struck in their monochrome desert of “its”- are entirely oblivious to.”

el tenedor: masculine object in spanish.

So the way we view the world is completely relative to what we have been exposed to as children. Our language can have an impact on what we view as important and how we think about certain words and meanings. Different cultures value different things due to language. For example, the remote Australian tongue called Guugu Yimithirr refers to everything based on the directions on a compass. This short article further explains a situation in which this occurs, “http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-language-shapes-thought. Like Deutscher says, “So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways.”

Overall, languages across the world cause people to view objects, people, and space in a different light. One language that I would like to bring to attention is sign language. They have simplified versions of our words. Imagine you could not use your words and you never learned the verbal words of your native home. This would cause you to communicate differently with everyone around you. Because deaf people have never heard the negative or positive connotations of some words, they can only understand through body language. This is a video about how communication between a couple differs from other couples. After all, life and sociology is all about relativism. This boy and girl still learn to communicate, but her views on language are different than his. It is all about where you are and what your situation entails.