Video Fix: Can the language we speak affect our behaviour?

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Can-Language-Affect-How-You-Spend-Your-MoneyDo the languages we speak influence our thought, identity and personality? Is there a connection between them and the healthy or unhealthy habits we follow? Or going even further, can language shape our economic behaviour?

People started dealing with the question of whether languages mold the way we think hundreds of years ago. Charlemagne advocated that “to have another language is to possess a second soul”, while Ludwig Wittgenstein proclaimed that the limits of one’s language are the limits of their world. In the 19th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt saw language as the expression of a nation’s spirit. Later, the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf formulated the principle of linguistic relativity or else the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, “the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.” The principle’s definition contains two versions: the weak version where “linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour” and the strong version where “language determines thought and linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories”.

The economist Keith Chen also believes that the language we speak can affect our behaviour, especially when it comes to how the language deploys the future tense. More specifically, Chen claims that “countries which conflate their talk of the present with the future, feel the future more keenly, and therefore exhibit behavior which prepares for that future in the present, i.e. by saving more money, or being better about practicing safe sex. Countries on the other hand which have more structured ways of talking about the future, with properly conjugated tenses, tend to see their future as further away, and therefore something that can be put off until tomorrow and ignored.”

This position could be a plausible answer to what has caused the present financial crisis! What do you think?

Sources:

The ‘Futureless zone’: Can language affect economic behavior?

Lost in Translation

e-Study Guide for: Thinking Through Communication: An Introduction to the Study of Human Communication, 5th Edition

Linguistic Relativity

 

Written by Evangelia Antoniou,
Communication Trainee at TermCoord
Student at the University of Luxembourg