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Every time I travel to NYC, I get lost in the many languages spoken around me. It’s always beautiful and fascinating that a combination of sounds and tones can mean so much to one person and absolutely nothing to another.
There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today with about 2,000 of those languages having less than 1,000 speakers. So many of the languages you hear on the streets of NYC support the universal grammar theory, which proposes that if human beings are brought up under normal conditions (not those of extreme sensory deprivation), then they will always develop language with properties (e.g., distinguished nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from lexical words).
However, there are exceptions to this rule. These three languages reveal how the habits of speech can affect our thinking.
 Directions
I don’t know about you, but I hate when people give me compass directions—am I supposed to take out a compass when someone tells me to walk two blocks to the east? Fortunately, for me, a native English speaker, the English language orients everything around me; left, right, in front, or behind. You move forward and backward in relation to the direction you are facing. Image credit
The Guugu Ymithirr aboriginal tribe in Queensland, Australia, however, uses cardinal directions to express spatial information. They are imprinted from a young age with an “internal compass” so they are able to direct their speech along a compass line. Further study is needed to decide if this creates a less egocentric society since their spatial information is not relative to themselves.
Time
The Prompauraaw people in Queensland, Australia, speak Kuuk Thaayorre. They also use cardinal directions to express location, but this also affects their interpretation of time. In a series of experiments, linguists had Kuuk Thaayorre speakers put a series of cards showing the passage of time, such as a man aging, in order. In one of the experiments, the speakers were facing south and in the other, they were facing north. In both instances, the speakers arranged the cards in order from east to west. By contrast, English speakers would always arrange the cards from left to right.
The speakers in the experiment were never told which direction they were facing. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, the passage of time was intimately tied to cardinal directions.
Color
According to the theory of “basic color terms,” all languages had at least terms for black, white, red, and warm or cold colors. However, on an island in Papua New Guinea where the islanders speak Yélî Dnye, there is no word for color. Speakers talk about color as part of a metaphorical phrase, with color terms derived from words for objects in the islander’s environment. For example, to describe something red, islanders say “mtyemtye,” which is derived from a word that means “red parrot species.” The islander’s grammar reinforces the metaphorical nature of the language, saying, “The skin of the man is white like the parrot,” rather than “He is white.”
There are several more examples of how language can affect how a culture thinks and views or describes the world. To learn more about languages, click here.
Has any word (or lack of word) affected your interpretation of the world?
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Re: Strange Languages
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