Linguistic relativity

Linguistic relativa-what now?

The dissertation for my MSc in Scientific, Medical and Technical Translation with Translation Technology (I know, it’s a mouthful) at Imperial College London focused on linguistic relativity theory in relation to the grammatical and lexical differences between Japanese and English.

It may sound complicated but it is essentially the theory that the language you speak affects the way you think, or more realistically, pushes you into conceptualising something in a certain way.

I explored this theory across a number of different fields, but I wanted to highlight some of the most interesting findings from my research.

Colour

The first part of the thesis dealt with how English and Japanese express colour differently.

This is most evident in the Japanese word “ao”, which refers to things that an English speaker would distinguish as either “blue” or “green”. So, a Japanese speaker would use the same word “ao” to describe a “blue sky” or a “green apple”.

This is not because Japanese people see differently, but rather every language in the world divides the colour spectrum up into various sections. The way in which the colour spectrum is cut up into basic colours is somewhat arbitrary, and has to be kept in mind when learning any language.

Memory

Another interesting part of linguistic relativity is the effect that different languages can have on memory and subsequent recall.

A classic illustration of this was a study by Fausey and Boroditsky (2010) in which English and Spanish participants were shown the same video of intentional and accidental events, like someone knocking over a vase.

They found that for accidental events, Spanish speakers frequently encoded the event in their minds as “Se rompió el florero (the vase got broken)” instead of “he/she broke the vase” due to the more common use of that grammatical construction in Spanish.

As Spanish doesn’t allow so easily for encoding “he” or “she”, the researchers found that Spanish speakers were worse at remembering the gender of the perpetrator than English speakers.

This difference could have very real-world consequences for eye-witness testimonies in a legal context!

If you’re interested in reading more, the whole dissertation is available at the link below: