The gender of a key
At the University of California, San Diego, a simple question shows a feature of the human mind: how does the language we speak shape our perception of reality? This question is part of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a theory of linguistic relativity. For decades, the idea that language influences thought was controversial, but controlled experiments by cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues provided powerful new evidence.
One of the most compelling experiments focused on grammatical gender. Boroditsky presented native German and Spanish speakers with a series of objects and asked them to describe them in English. The objects chosen had opposite grammatical genders in the two languages. For example, the word for "key" is masculine in German (der Schlüssel) and feminine in Spanish (la llave). German speakers consistently described keys with words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," and "useful." Spanish speakers, however, described the exact same objects using words like "golden," "little," and "lovely."
The pattern reversed for the word "bridge," which is feminine in German (die Brücke) and masculine in Spanish (el puente). German speakers described bridges as "beautiful," "elegant," and "slender." Spanish speakers used adjectives like "big," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." Since the experiment was conducted in English, the results could not be an artifact of the native languages' grammar; instead, the grammatical genders learned over a lifetime were shaping the speakers' associations and feelings about the objects themselves.
Time, color, and blame
Boroditsky's research is about gender. Her work with the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal community in northern Australia, showed a different conception of time. The Kuuk Thaayorre language does not use relative spatial terms like "left" and "right." Instead, they exclusively use cardinal directions—north, south, east, west. One might say, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." When asked to arrange a series of pictures showing a temporal progression (like a man aging), English speakers place them from left to right. The Kuuk Thaayorre arrange them from east to west, mimicking the path of the sun. The physical orientation of the cards depended entirely on which direction the person was facing.
Color perception is also subject to linguistic influence. The Russian language has two distinct words for blue: goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. Boroditsky's experiments demonstrated that Russian speakers are faster at distinguishing between two shades of blue if they fall across this linguistic boundary. This shows their language creates a "psychologically active perceptual boundary" that English speakers lack.
Even our sense of justice can be nudged by grammar. In English, it is common to use agentive language even for accidents, such as "He broke the vase." In languages like Spanish or Japanese, a non-agentive phrase like "The vase broke" is more common. Studies showed that English speakers are more likely to remember who was responsible for an accidental event and assign more blame and higher financial penalties than speakers of languages that use non-agentive framing.