The above question came up in one of my conversations with a friend and the topic has continued to kept me interested ever since.
My first thought was that we don’t really need a language to think in… I thought it’s a misconception..that we just perceive it or take it for granted that we are thinking in words. But soon I realised that I was thinking in a language all the time!
The next question was.. since I am bilingual, which language do I think in? Most of the people I asked, answered English.. but that’s probably because we just use English more in day to day.. specially when it comes to work. We have been taught in English, we think in English, and in the case of all my friends.. we design in English. I have noticed how I find it particularly hard to talk about or explain my work in Hindi when I am home. No matter how much I try I keep shifting to English after every two words.. I am too accustomed to it.
After reading like a million articles, papers etc.. (interesting excerpts from a few have been given below) I realize that in many ways Language is the one and only single greatest creation of all times. It probably was a key element in the development of human beings. We are such developed creatures because we can think.. and we can think because we have language! You cannot write without a pencil and you cannot think the way we do if you don’t have a language.
We not only think in a language but it also determines how we perceive things.. it is born out of a culture and the needs of a culture. Imagine if you were given an assignment to come up with a new language.. not script, a language.. new words.. new rules.. everything… what would determine how you come up with this new language? the way in which you perceive things, the way you categorize things, your beliefs and your understanding of the world around you.
Are you unable to think about things you don’t have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don’t think about them? Part of the problem is that there is more involved than just language and thought; there is also culture. Your culture—the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and so on that you pick up from the people you live and interact with—shapes the way you think, and also shapes the way you talk.
In other words, the influence of language isn’t so much on what we can think about, or even what we do think about, but rather on how we break up reality into categories and label them. And in this, our language and our thoughts are probably both greatly influenced by our culture.
Excerpt from- LSADC: Does the language I speak influence the way I think?
Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us us to think about.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant.
In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense.
Excerpt from- New York Times: Does your language shape how you think?
My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: “We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have.”
…The research team simply asked Pirahã speakers to count different numbers of batteries, nuts and other common objects. Rather than having a word consistently used to describe “one X” a different word for “two Xs” and yet another word for “three Xs,” the Pirahã used hói to describe a small number of objects, hoí to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. Basically, these words mean “around one,” “some” and “many.”
The lack of number words had a profound and surprising effect on what the Pirahã could do. In a series of experiments, the researchers presented Pirahã participants with some number of spools of thread. The participants’ task was simply to give the researcher the same number of balloons. If the participants were allowed to line up the balloons next to the spools of thread one-by-one, they did fine. But if they weren’t allowed this crutch — for instance, if the spools of thread were dropped into a bucket one at a time, and then the participant had to produce the same number of balloons — they failed. Although they were generally able to stay in the ballpark — if a lot of spools went into the bucket, they produced a lot of balloons; a small number of spools, a small number of balloons — their responses were basically educated guesses.
Excerpt from- Scientific American: Does language shape what we think?
and gave Pormpuraawans* sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).
Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages.
…in recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills to count.
*Pormpuraawan is an aboriginal tribe in Australia, which has a language which doesnt have words such as left, right, front or back but instead used the geaographical directions- north, south, east and west.
Excerpt from- The Wall Street Journal: Lost in translation
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.
Excerpt from- The Awful German Language by Mark Twain
But now another question arises.. if we do think in a language… how do deaf and dumb people think? do they think visually? what about babies? they dont know any languages yet… or animals??
About one child in a thousand, however, is born with no ability to hear whatsoever. Years ago such people were called deaf-mutes. Often they were considered retarded, and in a sense they were: they’d never learned language, a process that primes the pump for much later development. The critical age range seems to be 21 to 36 months. During this period children pick up the basics of language easily, and in so doing establish essential cognitive infrastructure. Later on it’s far more difficult. If the congenitally deaf aren’t diagnosed before they start school, they may face severe learning problems for the rest of their lives, even if in other respects their intelligence is normal.
…Sacks (Oliver Sacks, writer of Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf) writes of a visit to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was endemic for more than 250 years and a community of signers, most of whom hear normally, still flourishes. He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. “Even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane,” Sacks writes. “She was dreaming in Sign.”
Excerpt from- The Straight Dope: In what language do deaf people think?
