Speakers of those languages where there is no category of the future are 30% more likely to save money for old age than native speakers of languages where the future tense is expressed grammatically. The ability to distinguish colors and the ability to navigate in space also depend on the language we speak.
Keith Chen is a behavioral economist. Originally Chinese, he grew up in the US in the Midwest. According to Chen, as a child, he thought about the fact that his native Chinese language made him speak and think about his family in a completely different way than Americans speak and think. For example, in Chinese, saying the phrase “This is my uncle” is not as easy as it might seem to a native English speaker.
“In Chinese, you simply have no choice, you just have to say a lot more about your uncle. The rules of the language require you to indicate which side he is your uncle from, whether he is related to you by blood or marriage, and if he is your father’s brother, then you must indicate whether he is older or younger. All this information must be provided without fail. The Chinese language does not allow me to miss it. If I want to follow all the rules, I need to think about all these factors.”
Save or spend
After becoming an economist, Keith Chen set out to understand how language is connected to our thoughts and behavior, and above all, how it affects economic decision making. For example, one of his studies shows that speakers of different languages have different visions of the future and, as a result, have different strategies for saving money. It is known that the category of the future tense is not in all languages.
For example, in Chinese, the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow are described in the same way.
After carefully analyzing a large amount of data from different countries, Chen found that these linguistic differences are accompanied by huge economic differences. Speakers of those languages where there is no future category are 30% more likely to save annually than native speakers of languages where the future tense is present. As a result, by retirement, the former accumulate 25% more (provided that they had a regular income).
Keith Chen explains it this way: “When we talk about a future separated from the present, it seems to us more distant, so we are less motivated to save money in order to secure financial well-being in years to come.”
To the left or southwest
Aboriginal Australians living in Pormperao don’t speak “left” or “right”; instead, they say “to the northeast” or “to the southwest,” says Lera Boroditsky, professor of psychology at Stanford University. In about a third of the world’s languages, the direction in space is indicated by such absolute, and not relative terms, as in English or Russian.
As Boroditsky notes, such constant linguistic training allows speakers of these languages to perfectly navigate in space and track their location even in unfamiliar areas. While on an expedition to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleagues discovered that the Pormperaowans, who speak Guuk Taayorre, always instinctively knew which direction they were facing.
Blame or Forget
In English, a broken vase is said to be broken (by someone), even if it broke itself for some reason. The Japanese and the Spaniard will say that the vase is broken.
In connection with these different verbal constructions, the results obtained by Lera Boroditsky’s student Caitlin Fosey are very interesting: English-speaking participants in her study were much more likely to remember the perpetrators of various minor incidents (those who accidentally pierced a balloon, broke an egg or spilled a drink) than native speakers of Spanish or Japanese.
Boroditsky argues that there is a correlation between this increased attention to the guilty and the American judicial system, which is aimed more at punishing perpetrators than at compensating for the suffering of victims.
Blue or cyan
Our ability to distinguish colors depends on whether our language has words that describe these colors, says Keith Chen. Back in 1954, researchers found that the Zuni language does not have different words for orange and yellow, and it is difficult for speakers of this language to distinguish between these colors.
In Russian there are separate words for blue and blue, in English they are denoted by the word blue. A 2007 study showed that Russian speakers were better at distinguishing shades of blue than those who spoke English.
Boy or girl
Hebrew has only masculine and feminine genders and no middle, and in Finnish the gender is not indicated at all, notes Lera Boroditsky. A study conducted back in 1980 showed that thought follows speech here as well. Hebrew-speaking children had an idea of their gender a year earlier than their Finn peers.