Does Your Language Affect How You Think?

People are taking many effort to get known what other people are think about. Is it fascinating if what one’s thinking is related to the language he/she speaks? Keith Chen makes a good point about that. In Chen’s TED talks, he states that he believes if a language has grammatical future tense, people speaks that language tend to save more money. If it’s true, studies on Human Praxiology might focus more on linguistic concerns. However, even I think this is really a novel point of view and seems to make a lot of sense to me, the hypothesis still lacks of evidence.

Keith lists many data in his speech. He first shows a statics of GDP in OECD countries and claims that futureless languages Countries save five percentage more of their GDP per year. It seems to be a convective evidence to prove his point, however, his data still needs to be more fine-sorted. Statistically, comparing the average of the data is not enough to prove futureless languages help on saving money. There are many other interference. For example, populations of different country may effect Keith’s statistic on GDP; or it there is a country has significant larger GDP than any of others, it may has some unexpected influence on the accuracy of the static. Also, on an economical degree, GDP is a complex computation of income. It contains government spending, bank loans, imports and exports, and many other parts. It’s inappropriate to make the conclusion without looking at all those parts.

There is a case strongly disproves Keith’s argument. The Pirahã (a tribe lives in Amazon, Brazil) people strongly tends to store things for tomorrow, but their language has no future tense at all.

 Keith also talks about the future tense of language might have something to do with health behaviors as well as saving moneys. Keith finds that families speak futureless languages less likely to smoke, have better body weight when retire, and more likely to use condoms. This is actually a very good point of studying the influence of languages on human’s behavior, but Keith failed to eliminate affections from other elements, like culture. Languages are always combined with its culture-- that you cannot simply talk about a language but ignore the culture which that language is born from. In this case, when we talk about language’s influence on saving money, weight controlling, sex behavior, it’s hardly not to consider: does the culture a language stands for encourages more on saving money? Does they eat differently that has less calorie? Does their culture encourage giving birth or not? These elements all can have an interference on the result on statistics. In fact, culture affects a lot more of human’s behavior. In the article “Does Culture Affect Our Personalities” by Sarah Sincero (www.explore.com), it states that culture is a specific group of people share some values, beliefs and norms, and those shared elements have affects on people’s behavior. When we learn about future tense, it is important to consider how much culture may take places in those conditions.