Formative Writing

Summary Thread 2

This week I evaluated Halle Sonnier, Suki Gangopadhyay, and Joseph Eguia. While I enjoyed reading all of their responses, I think the most interesting post I read was Joseph’s on the video “How Language Shapes the Way We Think." Joseph said that language “is the basis of all of our thought processes and dictates our perception of reality.”

This was a new perspective that I had not thought about because, were this true, every speaker of English or any other language would share the same worldview, and this worldview would be by default different from the worldview of every speaker of, say, Spanish. I agree that linguistic variation often results in very different ways of expressing one’s perception. But I do not agree with the idea that these different ways to express the same idea means everyone who speaks a different language from my language also thinks entirely differently as well. It's also true that not all Americans possess the same beliefs, despite sharing a common language. I also agree with Joseph’s comment that “there are certain distinctions made whenever I speak and think in one language versus the other.”

But I believe that these linguistic distinctions have no bearing on what we are ultimately saying.

For example, if someone says “I like listening to music” as opposed to “Me gusta escuchar música,” both are still expressing the same idea, despite being expressed with radically different grammatical constructions. It seems very unlikely that grammatical differences result in different perceptions of reality. If this were the case, communication among different speech groups would be impossible. It would also mean that learning an additional language – which is hard enough as it is – would entail learning an entirely different reality to boot! Which simply isn’t the case.

I very much enjoy this language/worldview debate, but I maintain that language is a tool to communicate. People learn second or third languages to communicate with new speech groups; they do not learn second or third realities.

Some good, very accessible works by Colombia professor and linguist John McWhorter might prove helpful here, particularly the following work:

References

McWhorter, J. H. (2016). The language hoax: Why the world looks the same in any language. Oxford University Press.