Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, researchers in the field of linguistic anthropology, notably Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, conducted experiments to try and determine what effect, if any, language has on a person’s perception. Though those initial studies have been hotly contested, the groundwork was laid, and we have made great strides since then in identifying the ways language affects a person’s perception of the world around them.
Mastery of another language makes you an ideal candidate for the hospitality sector, and studies show that it can also change the way you perceive the world around you.
In this short article, we’ll look at a few experiments and their subsequent results that we’re sure you’ll find fascinating.
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What Is Linguistic Relativity?
For early twentieth-century linguistic anthropologists, the hypotheses as to the relationship between language and culture differed greatly. The various hypotheses all fall under the umbrella term linguistic relativity. The most famous of these hypotheses is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that suggests that the particular language a person speaks has a strong influence on how that person perceives reality.
Early investigations into this hypothesis focused on a person’s perception of time—notably by studying the Indigenous peoples of North America in comparison to peoples of European descent. Later studies expanded on the idea, and it is those later studies we’ll be taking a closer look at in this article.
A Few Case Studies
The earlier Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is today largely scoffed at by academics. However, it still serves to inspire researchers to examine other possibilities as to how language shapes a person’s perception. Let’s look at a few examples.
Gender and Associations
Several languages—like German and Latin languages: Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese—assign a gender to otherwise inanimate objects. Researchers asked the question: Does the gender assigned to an object affect how we perceive that object?
Here’s what they found:
When interviewing Spanish and German speakers, they asked them to describe words that were feminine in one language and masculine in the other, for example, “bride” which is feminine in German (die Brücke) and masculine in Spanish (el puente).
The German speakers used words associated with women such as “beautiful” and “slender” whereas the Spanish speakers used words associated with men such as “strong.”
These same speakers associated words such as “potent” with men. Likewise, objects that in their language were assigned a masculine gender were deemed to be more “potent” than those assigned a feminine gender.
The Russian “Blue” and Decision-Making
In a 2007 study, researchers examined how or if language affected one’s perception of color. Russian speakers have two words for blue—goluboy (light blues) and siniy (dark blues)– whereas English speakers have only one.
English and Russian speakers were tested on speeded color discrimination tasks. The Russian speakers fared quite better than their English-speaking counterparts. The results seem to suggest that language does have a notable influence on a person’s perception, at least in the objective recognition of colors.
Can You Smell This?
The English language has few words to describe odors, instead preferring to rely on similes such as, it smells like garlic. However, this is not the case in other languages, notably in the language of the Umpila, Indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of Australia.
In a study examining the perception of odors among subjects across twenty different languages, Umpila people fared far better than people who spoke other languages. In fact, the study showed a direct correlation between the number of words for odors in a language and the ability of those speakers to accurately identify odors—also the speed at which they identified odors.
For languages with a richer variety of words to describe odors, such as Thai and Jahai, speakers of those languages performed better in the odor discrimination tasks than speakers of languages with few words to describe odors, such as Dutch or English.
Perfect Pitch
Perfect pitch is a term used to describe a person’s ability to identify the pitch of a sound—the degree of the highness or lowness of a sound. In diatonic music, for example, notes are differentiated by the names do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti (and “sharp” or “flat” to designate the notes in between).
Most musicians in the Western world rely on what is known as “relative pitch” to understand a musical motif. This means that the musician can identify and understand the relationship between the notes, but they are incapable of identifying a note’s pitch if that note is isolated. That ability is known as perfect pitch.
European languages are not pitch dependent. That is to say that the meaning of the word does not change regardless of the pitch it is spoken in. On the other hand, many Asian languages are pitch dependent.
For example, Mandarin has ten different syllable sounds. But each syllable sound can be produced in one of four different pitches: high-level, mid-rising, low-dipping, and high-falling. Other Asian languages operate in a similar intonation or tone-based fashion.
In a study of music students between the ages of 4 and 5 conducted by psychologist Diana Deutsch of the University of California in San Diego, approximately 60% of the Chinese-speaking students tested as having perfect pitch. This is in sharp contrast to the roughly 14% of their English-speaking counterparts.
A similar contrast was shown in other age groups, though the percentages did decrease as the students got older: Chinese speakers between 6 and 7 tested for perfect pitch at around 55%, whereas their US counterparts at around 6%. For students between 8 and 9, the percentages were around 44% for Chinese speakers and next to zero for their US counterparts.
What Languages Do You Speak?
While more research needs to be conducted, language, to some extent, has an impact on how we perceive the world around us. Which languages do you speak? How do those languages affect your perception?
The degree to which a language will impact your perception will have to do, of course, with how well you speak the language.
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