Transcription
I'll be talking about how the languages we speak shape the way we think and, of course, also how learning new languages changes the way that we think. Just getting my timer going here.
Um, now, uh, we humans have this incredible capacity for language, which is kind of like a magic power, right? So, right now, I am, uh, moving my vocal cords and making little hisses and tones and puffs while I'm exhaling. Those are making air vibrations. Through technology, those air vibrations are making their way to you. Uh, they're eventually vibrating your eardrums, and then your brain takes that pattern of vibrations from your eardrums and turns that pattern into thoughts. I hope, I hope that's happening, right? Thoughts are, thoughts are popping up now.
This is truly a magic power because with this way of communicating, we can take an idea from one mind and send it to another mind. So, right now, I can put an idea, um, a new thought in your head. I could say, imagine a giraffe making pancakes on a yacht while, um, listening to Bad Bunny. Uh, now, uh, if things have gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before, right? So, uh, this is a new idea, a new bizarre little image that I was just able to take existing elements in language, words that you know, put them together in a new combination that you haven't heard before, and give you a new image. And of course, with language, we can do this not just in the moment, but across great reaches of time and space. You can send an idea to the future. You can read the thoughts of people before, um. So, it's this incredible tool.
And of course, we have not just one language, but many, many languages spoken around the world. So, uh, I'm speaking to you in English. English is not my first language. I grew up speaking Russian until I was 12 years old. I grew up in Ukraine and Belarus, uh, and, um, so the topic of this meeting, uh, learning, uh, learning a second language is very, very dear to my heart because, of course, many people helped me along the way so that I can come and speak to you in English and, uh, sound reasonably proficient. So, um, thank you all for the incredible work that you do.
Okay, so there are lots of languages around the world. They all differ in their structures and what they require of their speakers. So, even if you were to say something really simple, like, child-like, childish level of, uh, simplicity, like, "I want to say, I live in the seventh blue house to the left of the big tree." These are simple ideas: numbers, colors, uh, directions, right? Basic things. As soon as you start trying to translate this into another language, you run into some problems.
Um, so the seventh blue house. Well, some languages don't have exact number words at all, so you couldn't say this. Some languages have number words, but they're using a very different numerical system. So, it might not be a base 10 system, but a base 12, or a base 8, or base 27 system, right? So, it would be a very different way of expressing this idea. What about blue? Well, uh, a lot of languages don't have a word like blue that English, that covers all the hues that English calls blue. So, for example, in Russian, there are two separate words: one for light blue, one for dark blue. There's not a single word that covers that region of color space. And in lots of languages, there isn't a distinction made between blue and green. Uh, so the house could be blue, could be green. It's a common enough conflation that anthropologists actually have a word for this color. It's, they call it "grue" in English.
Um, what about left of? Well, some languages don't use words like left and right and instead express directions in terms of some kind of absolute direction, like north, northwest of the tree, or with respect to a landmark, like, uh, volcano word of the tree, or ocean word of the tree. Or what about tree? Uh, this is kind of an odd word in English. It doesn't refer to any biologically relevant category. And in a lot of languages, more reasonably, have, uh, more specific ways of talking about things in the natural world. So, you might have to say the kind of tree it is, so, "left of the birch tree," or "left of the eucalyptus."
Now, languages focus our, our attention on a particular subset of things, um, out of the myriad of things that we could possibly pay attention to. They invite us to really pay attention to some parts of our experience. And let me just give you one example of an, like, an exquisite example of a language doing this. This is from Navajo, and these are Navajo verb stems for different kinds of ingesting, different kinds of consumption. So, eating, drinking, smoking. And I love this example because, of course, we all have so much experience eating and drinking, right? Every day we do, we do a lot of eating and drinking. So, you have a life of experience using your mouth, uh, to consume things. And yet, even this, in this very basic biological activity, Navajo can teach us very quickly, orient us to, uh, things we may not have paid attention to before.
So, for example, if you look at the bottom, there are different types of drinking. So, in Navajo, there are different verb stems for drinking from a cup as opposed to from drinking from a bottle. And the reason is, of course, those require different mouth motions. And that's true for a lot of these different, uh, verbs for, uh, eating different kinds of things, right? So, eating something that's mushy requires a different kind of mouth motion than eating something that's, uh, hard and requires a lot of chewing.
Now, as soon as I say this, as soon as I point this out, you say, "Of course, yeah." Now that I think about it, of course, I know that in some way, I understand that those require different mouth motions. But it's not something I ever thought about until I started looking at these Navajo grammar and saying, "Oh, wow, look at this really fine-detailed way that they have divided up this domain that, you know, I've had so much physical experience with." And yet, it's causing me to think about eating and drinking in a new way, just by looking at how Navajo does it.
Okay, now the question of whether languages shape the way we think is a very long-debated, uh, question. A lot of people have commented on it. So, for example, Charlemagne said, "To have a second language is to have a second soul." Charles V said, "A man who knows four languages is worth four men," was a very strong statement about the value of a language. If you're multilingual, maybe it's time to go to your boss and say, "Hey, I, uh, I need to be paid double or triple." Charles V says, "I'm worth, uh, four of my colleagues."
Frederick the Great, uh, had a more specific set of hypotheses. He said, "I speak English to my accountants, French to my ambassadors, Italian to my mistress, Latin to my God, and German to my horse." Not exactly sure how he came up with this set of, uh, inclinations, but this is the kind of thing we've all heard before, that such-and-such language is great for romance, and another language is good for argument or war or debate, whatever. None of these things are, are, um, based in science, right? So, these are just ideas that someone made up.
There are, however, specific things that languages can make us better and worse at, uh, that come from particular elements of grammar that I will show you empirical examples of now. Not everyone throughout history has been enamored with this idea that language shapes the way we think. Uh, so, for example, um, Shakespeare, uh, floated the idea that maybe what you call something doesn't matter at all. So, he has Juliet say, "You know, what's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Well, that suggests that maybe, uh, maybe it doesn't matter what you call it, and regardless of the language you're speaking, reality is the same, and the way we perceive reality is the same. Turns out, people have done experiments now on whether roses smell, uh, better or worse if they're called by other names. And it turns out they don't smell as good. You tell people it's grass when they're smelling roses, for example, then if you tell them it's roses. So, uh, at least on this count, Shakespeare was, uh, has been shown to be incorrect. I'm sure he was extremely right on lots of other things.
Okay, so let me give you a couple of examples of how languages differ and how they shape the way that we see the world. So, um, there's a big, continuous, uh, world of color, and languages divide up this color spectrum into different categories. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple of words, like light and dark, or warm and cold. And where languages put boundaries between colors differs from language to language. So, for example, in Russian, there's not a single word that covers all of the shades that English calls blue. And instead, there are separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). So, Russian speakers have a lifetime of experience of distinguishing between light blues and dark blues. In English, it's obligatory, of course, you can do it in English, you're just not required, right? You can use the word blue for all of these shades. And when we do experiments testing people's ability to tell the difference between different shades of blue, what we find is Russian speakers are faster, more accurate distinguishing shades of blue that they would call by different names, so, "goluboy" from "siniy." And for English speakers, there's no difference here because all of them are blue, right?
So, this tells us that language gets in, even at the very earliest moments of perception, right? This is a very, uh, simple task. Can you tell the difference between two patches of blue? It's, you don't have to be very smart and sophisticated to do this task. It's one of the earliest decisions that your brain is making. And yet, even at that very, very early nuts-and-bolts level of perception, language is already getting in and meddling in how you're going to see the world.
Um, here's another example, a little further up in the cognitive stream, is how we think about time. So, the word "time" is actually, uh, the most frequent use noun in English. Uh, we're obsessed with time. Other temporal words like "year" and "day" are also in the top 10. And in a lot of Indo-European languages, time words are very, very frequent. So, this is a common pattern. So, we talk about time a whole lot. Um, but, uh, the way that people talk about time differs from language to language. One common pattern is that people use spatial words, spatial metaphors, to talk about time. And we also lay out time spatially in calendars, for example. But again, the way, uh, the way that we lay out time spatially differs from culture to culture.
So, let me give you some examples. Um, this is a, a little nutritional supplement for children that Nestle was selling. And, um, if you read, if you're an English speaker and you read, um, the way English is written from left to right, then it's very easy to look at this little graph and say, "Oh, yeah, I see what this nutritional supplement will do for my kid, right?" You just kind of scan it from left to right. Well, when they started selling this product in Arabic-speaking countries, they ran into a problem because Arabic is written from right to left. And if you're used to looking at things and scanning things from right to left, then, um, it was actually becomes very puzzling to figure out what this product does for your child, right? Because, um, what does it do? Does it make your child unable to walk? Does it put them to sleep? It's not clear. Um, so, of course, they had to change that.
And this applies not just to how we organize time, but incredibly to how we organize so many events that unfold in our minds. So, for example, in, in this study, participants were just asked, um, "Imagine Bill is giving flowers to Mary. Can you draw me a picture that shows that?" And, when people who read from left to right are asked to do this, they will draw Bill on the left and Mary on the right. When people who read from right to left, like people who read Arabic, for example, are asked to do this, they'll draw Bill on the right, Mary on the left. So, you see an event unfolding in your mind, the way that your language is written. So, even this tiny little, arbitrary, almost arbitrary detail of the writing direction of the, of the language is structuring the way normal events are unfolding in your mind's eye without us even realizing it, right? It's just something happening privately in our mind's eye, but yet it's being structured by the way that you read and write.
And this also applies to how we organize time. So, for example, if I take a bunch of pictures like this, say I shuffle them, put them in a stack, and say, "Can you lay them out in the correct order?" English speakers are extremely likely to do it from left to right like this. And Hebrew or Arabic speakers who read from right to left are extremely likely to do it in the opposite direction, going from right to left.
Um, now, right to left and left to right are, is not the only direction that time goes. So, for example, in English, we put, uh, the future in front of us. So, we say, "The best is ahead of us," "We're approaching the holidays," "The worst is behind us." And that's also the way we gesture, the way we use our bodies when we, when we talk about time. Um, for a long time, people argued that that had to be the case biologically because, of course, you, you know, we have eyes on the front of our heads, not in the back of our heads. We walk forwards, not backwards. So, of course, the future must be in front. Well, it turns out in a lot of languages and cultures, the future is not in front. Past is in front.
So, here's an example from Aymara. Um, in Aymara, they live in the highlands of Bolivia. And in Aymara, the past is metaphorically in front, and the future is behind. And so, this gentleman here, he's talking about the olden days, and when he's talking about the olden days, he's gesturing far in front of himself. Um, now, why would the past be in front? Well, for the Aymara, they say, "Well, the past is manifest. It's known, right? That's why you can see it. That's why it's in front of your face. The future is unknown. That's why it's behind your head." So, to them, it seems extremely absurd and extremely hubristic that we would think that we are looking at the future. You can't know what the future is, right? Obviously, the future has to be unknown, and it only becomes visible as it becomes the present and turns into the past. Um, so, time doesn't have to flow left to right or right to left necessarily. It can go from front to back, back to front, depending on your cultural ideas and beliefs and the metaphors in your language.
But that's also not the only, those are also not the only ways that time can go. So, here's an example from a community I had to work, uh, with in Australia. These are the Kayardild people. They live on, uh, the west coast of Cape York in Pormpuraaw. And, um, in languages like Kayardild, and there are a lot of languages like this, uh, you don't use words like left and right. And instead, everything is done in cardinal direction space. So, for example, north, south, east, and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. So, their languages, like in Guugu Yimithirr, where you even use these words for body parts. So, you say, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." And of course, if you move, uh, the leg, you have to recompute. It's no longer your southwest leg. So, imagine doing the Hokey Pokey dance in a language like this. You'd have to do a lot of mental gymnastics.
But in Kayardild, the way that you say hello, um, in English, we say, "How are you?" "Fine." And in Kayardild, you say, "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be something like, "Oh, north-northwest, in the far distance. How about you?" Um, so, you literally can't get past hello in this language if you don't know your heading direction. If you imagine applying this in your life, as you're walking around your day, everyone that you greet, you have to report your heading direction. Of course, at first, it might be hard. You might not know exactly which way things are in cardinal space. But if that was really the price of admission to any conversation, if you literally couldn't get past hello if you didn't know your heading direction, you would get oriented pretty fast, right? Uh, the language would force you to stay oriented. And in fact, research has shown us that people who speak languages like this stay oriented extremely well. In fact, better than we used to think humans could. Right? There used to be this story that said, "Oh, well, humans can only orient this well, and it's a biological limitation. Other creatures orient better because they have magnets in their beaks or in their scales, or they have some other kind of biological sensors that we don't have." It turns out humans can do this. And not only that, it's not just that we can do it. It's not even that hard to learn. And to me, this is a wonderful example of how our brains are capable of so much more than we give them credit for, where something that we used to think was impossible for humans actually turns out to be not just not impossible, but not even that hard. It just seemed impossible because it's not what we're used to, as opposed to what are actually the limits of the human mind.
Okay, so I was talking about how we think about time. So, uh, we have this community that, uh, doesn't use words like left and right to lay out time, how to, uh, to lay out space. So, how do they lay out time? Here's a simple task I took to the Kayardild. Is there a bunch of pictures of my grandfather at different ages? And they looked at a bunch of other picture sets like this. So, I take a bunch of pictures, I put them in a stack, I shuffle them, I give them to you, and I say, "Could you lay these out so they're in the correct order?" And the way I've laid them out here is from left or right, the way an English speaker would do it. Here's some data from, uh, the Kayardild. Here's one person. They're sitting facing south, and these are a bunch of different card sets that they've laid out, and the numbers show you the direction. And so, you can see they've laid everything out from left to right. Now, here's another person. They're, I'm sorry, this is the same person on a different day. They're sitting facing north, and now they've laid everything out from right to left. Here's another person. They're sitting facing east, and now they've laid everything out coming towards them.
Well, what's the pattern here? The pattern is all of these go from east to west, in the direction and motion of the sun, right? So, there are two ways of thinking about these data. One way is to say, "Oh, so strange. They lay time out going in different directions depending on which way they're facing." But another way is to say, "Oh, actually, no. For them, time always goes in the same direction on the landscape, right? From east to west." And isn't it so weird that for us, time is constantly shifting directions, right? So, isn't it so weird that if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, left to right? If I'm facing this way, time goes this way. If I'm facing this way, time goes this way. Like, how egocentric of me to make the dimension of time turn every time I turn my body, right? Uh, you might think, "Oh, for the Kayardild, they have this very reasonable system where time is laid out in one direction on the landscape, and then as you, as your body shifts, time stays the same on the landscape."
Um, now, okay, so there are lots of different ways of organizing time in, uh, different languages. Um, what happens when you learn a new language with different time metaphors, with a different way of organizing time? Do you start thinking differently? This is a study we've done in many different forms in my lab, where we bring people in and we teach them new metaphors for time. For example, we might take English speakers and teach them to use vertical metaphors to say, for example, "Mondays above Tuesdays above Wednesday," or the reverse. And what we see is very quickly, as you learn these new metaphors, you actually learn a new internal spatial representation. And, uh, very quickly, learning new ways of talking changes the way you think, introduces new non-linguistic resources into your mind that you can then use. A new vertical timeline, for example, that exists in your mind that you didn't have before.
Okay, language can also be an entryway into, into whole realms of thought. So, for example, if I, uh, ask you, "How many penguins are there here?" Um, now, I predict how a lot of you solved this problem. You probably did something like, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight," where you named each one with a successive number in this number sequence that you learned as a kid. And then when you've named the last one, eight, the last word that you said is the number in the set. This is a little trick that, uh, culturally acquired trick that many of us, uh, learn as little children. We don't even remember learning it. It happened so long ago, but it's a very, very clever idea that allows us to keep track of exact quantities. And it's the first step, the first entryway into this whole world of mathematics, that of course has built everything around us. I'm talking to you from halfway around the world, and, uh, none of that would be possible without mathematics.
Now, different languages have different approaches to numbers. Um, so, uh, we use a base 10 number system. Uh, base 10 is very popular around the world because we have 10 fingers. Base 20 is also popular. Base 5 is also popular for obvious reasons. I'm wiggling my fingers here to show you what the reasons are. But even body-based systems, uh, differ across languages. So, here, for example, is a number system from, uh, Papua New Guinea, and it's a body-based system, but instead of base 10, it used more parts of your body, and so it's a base 27 system. Um, in this language, the number words are actually the names for the body parts. So, for example, if you want, uh, potatoes, you would say you want elbow potatoes, right? Um, so, it's a system that goes in rounds of 27 rather than in rounds of 10, the way the English does. The largest base number system I know is base 81, and the smallest is base 2.
So, there's a great variety, uh, of languages. And also, there are some languages that don't have exact number words at all. So, this is, um, an example from the Pirahã group that lives in the Amazon in Brazil. In Pirahã, there are no exact number words. So, there's no way to say exactly two or exactly seven. They have words for "relatively fewer," "relatively more," but just they're kind of imprecise words of expressing relatively more, more, or fewer things. And, um, here's an experiment where the researchers asked, uh, participants to match exactly the number of spools of thread with the balloons. And when they're laid out perpendicular like this, so you can't visually match exactly one to one, the Pirahã start having trouble doing even this simple kind of task after you get past about three or four, right? So, they start approximating. And you know that someone is approximating rather than counting things specifically because the errors increase proportionally to the number of things in the set that you have to, that you would have to keep track of.
So, even in this very, like, relatively basic task of just being able to keep track of the exact number, not having access to this little linguistic trick that we're all taught as kids makes a big difference. And you can see this in communities, for example, in deaf, in deaf signers, home signers who are not exposed to a, a structured sign language, we're just inventing signs at home. Even if they live in a community like here are Nicaraguan sign, sign, uh, signers live in Managua, even if you live in a community that's very numerate, if you don't have access to a language that has number words, it's really, really hard to get into this world of, uh, mathematics. Even the first few steps. Um, in human history, number systems were invented a handful of times. And the specific system that we use was invented once in India and spread around from there. So, it's actually something that's very, very hard to do on your own. And an incredible benefit that comes to us from the intellectual work of people before us who invented these number systems over a huge amount of time, perfected them. And now we can do things in our minds that, uh, even a few hundred years ago, were only, uh, only a handful of people in the world could even conceive of doing.
So, just, uh, for fun, let me give you an example of, um, these are number words in a real, existing, spoken human language somewhere in the world. That's what you see on the left. And this is a little puzzle you can work on in your own time. The question is, can you figure out what the, uh, number words in the middle, uh, mean? And can you figure out how to say the numbers, uh, on the right? And what if you attempt this puzzle, definitely try it with, uh, some paper and pencil, maybe a friend. It's a hard puzzle, but what you'll see is, in order to learn this language, in order to learn the number words in this language, you actually have to start thinking about numbers in a different way. The language forces you to organize, uh, the numerical system in a different way. Um, and so it's just a really wonderful example of how languages really structure the way we think about the domains that we talk about.
Okay, let's switch to another example. Now, we're talking about, um, categories languages create. Let's talk about grammatical gender. This comes up in second language learning all the time. So, if you're coming from a language that doesn't have grammatical gender and you have to learn a language that does have grammatical gender, where all nouns are, for example, masculine or feminine, or any other set of genders that exist in languages, people complain endlessly. Or if you switch from one language to another that has, uh, different genders, people complain endlessly. So, Mark Twain has this, uh, essay about learning German. A lot of it is about the grammatical gender system in German, and the title of the essay is "The Awful German Language." So, it tells you exactly how unhappy he was about having to learn grammatical genders.
David Sedaris, in "Me Talk Pretty One Day," writes about learning French and his frustration with genders. At some point, he's so frustrated, he decides that, uh, he's only ever going to refer to things in the plural because then you don't, you don't have to know the gender. So, that, of course, means that when he goes to buy things, he has to buy at least two. So, he has to buy two toasters and two loaves of bread because that way he doesn't have to reveal that he doesn't remember the grammatical gender of a toaster or a loaf of bread in, um, in French.
So, um, one of the reasons, of course, it's so frustrating is these grammatical genders are largely arbitrary. So, if you're going from one language to another, it's very hard to predict what gender things, uh, would be. And so, for example, even for basic things like the sun and the moon. The moon, um, is masculine in German, feminine in Spanish. The sun, it's the reverse. Does this actually matter for how people think about the sun and the moon? Do German speakers think of the sun as being somehow more stereotypically female-like, and the moon as somehow typically male, in the reverse for Spanish speakers? Turns out that's the case. So, if you ask people to describe objects, they give you more stereotypically gendered, masculine or feminine, descriptions depending on the grammatical gender in their language. Even young kids learning, say, Spanish or, uh, French as their first language, if you ask them, "Can you tell me what kind of voice this, uh, toaster should have in an animated film?" Right? So, we're making a little animated movie, and this toaster is going to have a speaking role. What voice should it have? They'll give it a boy voice or a girl voice depending on the grammatical gender in their language.
And this is an effect you can actually see with your own eyes. If you go to a museum and you ask, "Well, how do artists decide if they're going to personify time or death or truth or charity? How do they decide what kind of body it's going to represent time or it's going to represent death?" We, uh, did a look through several hundred years of European art, millions of images in Artstor, and what we found is that 78% of the time, the grammatical gender in the artist's native language predicted the gender of the personification. So, here, for example, are Michelangelo's "Time of Day." So, it's the dawn, the day, the dusk, and the night. And all of these are in agreement with grammatical gender in Italian.
Okay, now when I talk about how the languages we speak shape the way we think, um, people always ask me if there are advantages to being bilingual. And there, there's actually been a huge amount of research on whether or not there are, uh, particular cognitive advantages that bilinguals have. And there's also been a lot, a lot of disagreement in the literature. But generally, the kinds of things people find are, there are, uh, advantages in cognitive control. You have to figure out which language you're going to speak, uh, to whom, especially for young children. They have to keep track of who speaks one language, who speaks another language. So, it's, it's an extra skill that they're learning, and they have to learn to speak the proper language to the proper person. Uh, at the, uh, at the other side of life, their advantages, their protective advantages. Bilingualism has, uh, so, um, people who maintain, uh, multilingualism are relatively protected against onset of Alzheimer's and dementia. Um, but generally, when people ask me like, "Oh, I've heard that there's a great wonderful advantage to be bilingual, so I, I want to learn a language because of that." I think, "Well, how silly." Like, the real advantage of being bilingual is obvious. It's that you get to speak another language, right? It's, you acquire a superpower. You can talk to all of these other people in the world.
So, whether or not we focus on the specific advantages of, like, maybe you get like a few more points on a cognitive control measure or whatever, there's a very obvious advantage to being bilingual, which is that you get to speak a whole other language, and then you can learn others, and you can speak those, right? It is, it is acquiring a superpower. And it's acquiring not just a way of a new way of talking, it's acquiring a new way of thinking. And also, for a lot of people, it's a new way of feeling, right? So, a lot of bilinguals will say, "I actually feel like a different person when I'm speaking one language or another." Right? So, it's just a very, very common experience.
Now, there are lots of reasons, idiosyncratic reasons, for why this could be so. For example, for me, um, Russian is the language of childhood and family. English is the language of adulthood and work. Obviously, those have different personality associations, different contexts, right? So, of course, I would feel differently when I'm speaking one language or another. And, uh, every person who's bilingual is bilingual in a different way, right? And they will have their own personal, uh, personal associations with the languages. But here's some common things that we find. One is, uh, often times people report that emotions can be less vivid in new languages than they are in their first language. Um, and you see this, uh, especially when, like, one very charming way to show this is in how taboo swear words are in your second language. Um, of course, when we're growing up, when we're kids, uh, we're told not to swear. We're reprimanded for using taboo language. So, it's emotionally very connected to this idea of being punished, and it seems very taboo. But if you learn a new language in adulthood, then those, uh, swear words just don't seem to have the same kind of weight, the same kind of, um, naughtiness attached to it that, uh, that they do in your first language, the language of childhood.
There's also research suggesting that, uh, bilinguals act in more "quote unquote" rational ways when they're making decisions in their second language. And this is partially because of this disconnect from, uh, emotion that you can make when you make decisions that could be based on emotion or could be based more on kind of cold math or cold logic. Um, because a second language is less connected to these kind of primal emotional, uh, uh, levels, you're less likely to, uh, rely on emotion, more likely to rely on more utilitarian, uh, considerations. For some people, learning a new language is an opportunity to shake off whatever might be unwanted, right? If you've had bad experiences in your first language, if you've had traumatic experiences, uh, uh, stressful experiences, switching into another language, they report makes them feel like they're free from that emotional baggage of the past, right? It kind of gives them a new lease on life, a new way of, uh, of being, like a, a new skin to live in. And just like moving to a new place or starting a new in a new workplace, it kind of gives you an opportunity to craft a new persona. And a lot of people report that they take the opportunity of learning another language to actually craft a, a new kind of persona, separate themselves from whatever history that they have in their past, which could be good or bad, right?
But of course, most importantly, learning a new language is a passport to connect with humans around the world, right? Especially if you're learning a language like English, where you're going to be able to speak to hundreds of millions of people. That, um, is an incredible opportunity for connection. Very obvious.
Okay, to start to wrap up, languages and cultures make us super smart. We inherit so much intellectual labor from people who have come before us and developed these incredibly sophisticated systems for communication and thinking. But also, if we're just inside one language, um, these, the languages and cultures that we have reduce cognitive entropy. What I mean by that is that on any topic, potentially our brain is capable of thinking lots and lots of different ways. We have incredible flexibility. We have incredible potential for flexibility. But generally, when we are thinking inside one language, inside one cultural context, we just stay kind of in, in the little trenches that languages and cultures have made for us, and rarely do we peek outside and see, "Oh, how could I think about this differently?" When you're learning another language, it necessarily exposes you to new ways of thinking, and that opens up the possibility of thinking in yet new ways, and yet new ways, right? It kind of, uh, reopens up that flexibility that we all have. The fact that there are so many languages, not that humans invented not one way of speaking, but 7,000, actually many more in the past, is an incredible testament to the flexibility and ingenuity of the human mind, right? We're able to invent not one conceptual universe, but thousands of them. And also, languages are living things. They continue to change. They're human-made tools. We're constantly honing them to suit our needs. Um, and so each language, even within one language, gives us infinite capability to create new thoughts, new ideas, not just to reflect the world that we already live in, but to support the world we want to live in, right? We're constantly crafting our future, and language, of course, is part of that. And it's this incredibly creative, powerful tool for crafting the world that we wish to live in, rather than the one we're simply used to.
Okay, so that's a lot of lofty stuff. But of course, not every time that people try to change language does it actually have any effect or any, uh, good effect. So, here's an example. A few years ago, the US Energy Department tried to rename fossil fuels into "molecules of freedom." And then, uh, the next American export was going to be, quote unquote, "freedom gas." I don't need to tell you that this didn't work. It didn't catch on. I also don't need to explain why. Obviously, it's very, uh, slyly ridiculous. It doesn't sound good that we're exporting freedom gas. Um, and this is a thing that politicians do, quite often. So, um, a few years ago, um, the US Congress, this was an official act of Congress, renamed french fries into "freedom fries." This was because France wouldn't join in the war in Iraq. It also applied to "freedom toast."
Now, and it's not the first time that the US has done this. So, for example, during World War I, everything that was German got renamed into "Liberty" something or other. And then, uh, during, uh, this period of "freedom fries," French things got renamed. Now, there's a reason that these substitutions don't work, and that is, um, they're based on a wrong theory of how language and thought relate to one another. So, in language, if two words are interchangeable, um, like "postman" and "mailman," if they can be used in all the same contexts, that means they're synonyms, right? And so, if you can just change one word for another without changing any other context, what you're really telling people is those two words mean the same thing. And so, french fries become freedom fries, french toast becomes freedom toast. But what if we were to carry this out to its logical conclusion? So, would, uh, we also have freedom poodles and freedom kissing and freedom manicures? But what should we call France? Freedom land? And what should we call French? The language of freedom? Right? You start out by thinking that you're communicating, "Oh, France is somehow antithetical to freedom." But actually, what you're communicating is that France and freedom are synonymous. It's exactly the opposite of the silly purpose you're trying to make.
So, I propose that if we really understand scientifically how language and thought relate to one another, how languages work, then even if we have very silly nationalistic purposes, like annoying the French, we can do it more effectively. So, if Americans really want to annoy the French, I say take things that the French hate and call them French. So, ketchup will become "French sauce." McDonald's would be the "French cafe." Monogamy would be the "French relationship." Disneyland, "Frenchland." Americans would be "French people," and so on.
Just a little fun. Again, thank you so much. Be delighted to take any questions. I don't know how we do questions, Lara. I'm here. I'm here. Can you hear me and see me? I can hear you and see you. Yes. Good stuff. Thank you so much. What a talk that was. So insightful and interesting. I think you just went into so many different corners and and ideas that English language teachers think about but aren't in the realm of researching these things. So thanks for bringing it all to light there. Much appreciated. So we've had lots of questions. I'm going to have to cherry-pick here. Um, sorry if I don't ask your question, but I'm just going to go ahead. This is an easy one to start with, a quick one. Can you please repeat, um, the peoples that you were talking about that who have time flowing from east to west? The group that I studied is called Kuuk Thaayorre. It's K-U-U-K T-H-A-A-Y-O-R-R-E. Sorry, say that again. Kuuk Thaayorre. But they're actually, here's the, here's the incredible thing. A third of the world's languages use cardinal directions instead of words like left and right to organize. And it's not a third of the world speakers because, of course, uh, there's some languages that a huge number of people speak, and there are some languages that are minority languages. But a third of the world's languages rely on cardinal directions. So, the Kuuk Thaayorre are not an exception. They're a, a relatively common pattern. And time flows, after we did the work on Kuuk Thaayorre showing the time flows for them from east to west, uh, we and others have done work all over the world looking at other absolute systems. And time doesn't have to flow from east to west. It can flow downriver. It can flow uphill. There are other, the cardinal directions that can organize time. It doesn't even have to go in a straight line. So, there is a community in Papua New Guinea where time flows into the village at one angle, and then once it hits the village, it takes a turn and flows out at a different angle. And this has to do with where the mouth and the source of the Yuat River are, which are very important for these folks. So, there are lots of other absolute systems for organizing time that are relative to whatever is important to that culture. Um, so the Kuuk Thaayorre are one example, but they're not a, a singular example. There are many, many, uh, situations like this that exist in the world.
Okay, I mean, that sounds cognitively, that sounds like a lot of work, or is it not? I mean, for me, knowing the direction of where I am, north, southeast, west, I kind of know where I am now because I know my house, I know where I'm living. Is it not a bit of overload? You kind of constantly need to know where in that village you are, or where in relation to the compass you are, right? So, um, I also felt that, um, before going there, and I, you know, I spend a lot of time outside. I like to, uh, forage for mushrooms in the woods, and I travel a lot. So, I'm often in new places. It would be really nice to be oriented. And I've spent my whole life occasionally getting lost. I have a reasonably good sense of direction, but occasionally I get lost. Um, and then I went to this community, and there, you know, literally every interaction you have with people, you have to think about your cardinal direction. And people are constantly pointing very precisely to places. And people also treat you like you're a little bit stupid if you don't know which way you're facing or you're going, because it is such a basic thing to them, right? So, and of course, it's frustrating if you've lived your life thinking you're quite clever, uh, and then you show up in a place and they're like, "Wow, you're pretty stupid." So, I was socially very motivated to figure out which way was which. And I remember one day I was walking along in the village, and suddenly I saw, uh, this little window pop up in my mind, and it was a map of the landscape, and I was a little red dot that was moving on a landscape. And as I turned, this window stayed locked. It turned in my mind's eye, but stayed locked on the landscape. And it did this automatically. It felt like I was doing no work to do it. It's just something that happened. Like this new widget appeared in my mind. And as soon as I saw that, I thought, "Oh, wow, that makes it so easy. Like, if this thing just keeps going, I'm golden." And, uh, I kind of sheepishly confessed this to someone there. I said, "You know, I saw, I like, I saw from a bird's eye view the way, uh, the landscape, and then it rotated in my mind." And they said, "Yeah, of course. How else would you do it?" So, wow. To them, it's extremely normal to constantly have a bird's eye view map going in their mind that is updating automatically. And if you look at Aboriginal art from that region, it's all done from a bird's eye view. So, you never paint people from this perspective. You paint people from above and see people's footsteps or their sitting postures. You see animals from above, and so on. So, um, again, it's something that I, I thought would be very hard, but after a week of being in that community, uh, my brain solved the problem of how to do it. And once it solved the problem, I was, I was like, "Oh, I see. This is actually both easy and extremely useful." Wow. And and socially required there, I mean, that's the thing is you just can't get away without knowing your directions there.
Okay, well, we've got, there's one more question I've got to ask. I think it was a really, really interesting question. Let me just get to it here. Um, moving more towards linguistics now, sort of specifically linguistics, I think this question is, and specifically on English. We're in a room, we're in a virtual moment with a lot of English language teachers. The question is from Elham. I want to thank you for this question. It's fascinating. Is there any research for the idea that English can be taught free of culture, probably based on the idea that it's no longer anyone's custody and it belongs to the user? Is there any research disagreeing with this or proposing an opposing view on this? That is a wonderful question. Um, uh, English, of course, is used by many, many different, uh, people, people around the world, in many, many different geographical environments, people across huge ranges of professions and, uh, socioeconomic situations. And you see English, uh, changing form in the different places that it's used, right? So, the English that's spoken in India is different from the English that's spoken in Singapore, is different from, uh, the English spoken in all kinds of places. And I think that's an incredible testimony, testament to the flexibility of language and the way that language is a, a human-made tool. We adjust it to suit our needs, both to suit the ideas that we already have in our minds, so often language adjusts to fit more, um, more easily with the structure of the home language, um, and sometimes it adjusts just to what it's useful for. So, I would say, uh, whatever it is that you're teaching a language for, any language, um, there, it's, it's a tool that will fulfill a certain set of purposes, right? So, if the purpose that you have is being a really good bus driver for people who speak English, then there are certain parts of English that you need to learn, and others are a lot less important. Um, and every sit, every person who's learning English is learning it for a particular reason. And so, yes, of course, it's, uh, it's possible to learn very, very different varieties that are suited to the goals that you have, right? So, if your goal is to travel in an English-speaking country and be able to ask for directions and order things, then you learn, you learn those parts. And then, uh, if your goal is to speak technically with colleagues about computer science, you're going to have to learn a different, a different set of things, right? So, language is, any language is a huge set of tools. And, uh, if you have limited time and, uh, limited resources, of course, focus on the things that are going to be most useful to you in that language. Um, so, kind of do sort of teach it free of culture where possible, if you're talking about relatively transactional use of, I think, uh, I, I don't think that it's, it's, I don't think that it's free of culture. It's that each one is a particular culture, right? It's like, it's each variety that you learn is, is its own culture. It's for its own purpose. And I am using the word culture here in the sense that, like, any two humans, whether they're roommates or best friends or a couple, they have their own culture of communication. There are things that you say to your intimate partner, you have inside jokes, you have things that you call things. Each, each dyad has its own culture of communication. And so, we're constantly creating these little cultures. And so, every learn, every learner of a new language is in, it's not that they're learning a language free of culture. They're learning a particular culture that is, you know, this is the set of tools that I have to solve this problem that I have. Um, and they may share that with other learners that have the same purpose for learning the language.
Okay, got it. Thanks so much there. I think you need to rest your voice. Thank you. A bit of a cough. Thanks so much for delivering the talk and sharing so much. This has been really fun. Thank you so much for having me.