By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban
How do we view the world? How do we communicate our physical and internal worlds? What makes us cultivate certain attitudes, opinions, convections towards how things go and stay marooned in them for the rest of our life, controlling most of the decisions we make and the actions we take? Do these views hold individually or communally. What is reality and is it true that my perspective is my reality? And how do our brains process reality? These questions have been raised since the dawn of history and intrigued linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, critics, neuroscientists, etc. One key element involved in answering these questions is language.
Language shapes worldview
The cognitive operations our brains do are universal, but communities differ in activating some and deactivating others in codifying experience. The result is a multiplicity of worldviews embedded in our words. The renowned American linguists and anthropologists Edward Sapir and his student William Whorf argue that the way we view things is determined or, at least, shaped by our language, which entrenches in our minds certain modes of thinking and certain mental and cognitive habits.Here are some of the most cited examples in this regard.
Defying the egocentric spatial systems
One is that the small indigenous Australian group Kuuk Thaayorre use navigation direction words such as south, north, east and west, instead of front, back, left, right, beside, next door and opposite to, to locate things in their spatial environment. Some examples include ‘I live south to the hill’ and ‘the tree is north to the field’. Humans regard themselves the centre of the universe, and the vast majority of languages have egocentric special systems pointing to things relative to our bodies. This gives rise to many anthropocentric views or philosophies claiming the superiority of humans and justifying the overexploitation of natural resources. Thanks to such ingrained concepts, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers start cultivating exceptional navigation skills as early as the age of two, and lead an eco-friendly life.
What is in a colour?
While strolling in a park surrounded by the greenery, do you have trouble identifying the various green shades of the trees or plants you spot? Probably, yes. In fact, our brains make generalisations based on similarity. As long as the trees share some degrees of greenness, our brains process green variations as one, though we know that trees are not coloured the same. Another frequently-cited example is how our language determines the way we perceive colours. Languages which have a wide variety of colour names, their speakers are better in distinguishing and assigning varied names to colours. Recent neurological studies show that colour terms are processed equally in the right and left hemispheres of the brain, unlike other linguistic data which are processed largely in the left hemisphere. Another interesting study argues that there are no colours in reality; colours are created by wave lengths sensed by colour cones in the brains. Fascinatingly, women have considerably more colour cones than men, which explains why women are better than men in making finer colour distinctions. However, counter evidence suggests that languages share such focal basic colour terms as black white, red, green, yellow and blue; along which colour memory is structured. This casts doubt on the linguistic relativity theory.
Tense and decision making
A further argument is that languages distinguishing future from present time “cause their speakers to plan less, save less, even care less for the environment,” suggested recent studies conducted by Keith Chen of Yale and three Australian economists. Another study suggests that Chinese people, whose language is tenseless and mark time by using expressions such as yesterday, tomorrow, today, next week, are so involved in thinking about future decisions, as the future is not separated from the present or the past. Of course, there are many languages around the world which have future tense but their speakers do not necessarily behave the same way.
Categorisation and connotations
In Korean, kinship system vocabulary is so vast. ‘Uncle’ in English has many equivalents denoting whether it is father’s brother or mother’s; uncle words in Korean also indicate their age. In some languages, including Spanish and Korean, the passive is so frequently used, probably due to concealing the agent or the doer of the action. Other languages necessitate putting the doer of the action or the subject at the end.
In some languages, it is imperative to identify or assign the gender of every noun. Stones and clouds, for instance, are living things in many indigenous languages. More startlingly, a study shows that in high-gendered languages, women’s employability prospects shrink. Words such as ‘master’, ‘governor’, ‘lord’ and ‘bachelor’ still retain their favourable positive connotations, on the contrary, their female equivalents have developed negative connotations over the years. Word choice is also instrumental in unmasking racism and discrimination against minorities.
The world is far too rich to be expressed in a single language
The above examples are usually furnished to support the theory that language shapes our worldview. However, language should not be seen as a barrier to our access to varied, rich and real world experience. “Each language is a way of understanding and interpreting the world,” says Chomsky, not a way of constraining our perception. Definitely, languages fell short of conceptualising the world. Finally, “the world is much greater than any language to describe,” commented Nobel laureate (chemistry) Prigogine. Languages are windows to the world, and the more the windows, the better the worldview. Hence, it is imperative to conserve languages, especially, the endangered ones as the loss of a language is a loss to the whole humanity.
By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban
Professor of Linguistics
Faculty of Arts
Kafr el-sheikh University
Email: [email protected]
