On the radio the other day there was a story about an Indigenous woman, a victim of the Sixties Scoop, reclaiming her heritage. She talked about how important studying her native language was to the process.
It made me think about how much we take language for granted. Once you learn it, you do things automatically because it becomes so ingrained and we do not appreciate just how important it is.
An argument can certainly be made that language is the most important technology humans ever developed. It is foundational to everything that has come since.
And there is no question there are huge cultural differences between groups of people who speak different languages.
But does the language we speak influence the way we see the world, or is it the other way around?
There has been some fascinating research done on this subject.
Researchers at Stanford University cite, for example, a tribe in Brazil that has no words for numbers. Because of that they cannot quantify things accurately. Consequently, quantifying things accurately is unimportant in their culture. Or was it because they didn’t think accurately quantifying things was important that they didn’t develop words for numbers?
In any event, wouldn’t that drive most English speakers crazy?
Apparently English also makes us more likely to lay blame, or is it that the people who developed the language liked to lay blame and thus it is reflected in the language?
In fact, it is drilled into us not to use the passive voice. If, for example, I bumped into a table and knocked over a lamp, I would probably say, “I broke the lamp.”
Speakers of other languages such as Spanish and Japanese are more likely to say, “the lamp broke” because to say “Thom broke the lamp” implies in was intentional.
The Stanford researchers even tested the impact of passive versus active voice by asking people to watch the infamous Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” from the 2005 Super Bowl then read a story about it.
The subjects who read Justin Timberlake “ripped the costume” were more likely to blame him and recommended 53 per cent higher fines than those who read “the costume ripped” even though they all witnessed the same event.
What does it say about English culture? On the one hand we might be too uptight, on the other, maybe we have a mature sense of responsibility.