The importance of language

“Language affects how you think” is something I heard said a lot by my teachers back in my teens, amongside other idioms underscoring the importance of language. I never understood what people meant by it, and was in fact somewhat suspicious of what I viewed as “pro-language advocacy”.

Now being a little older, I think this was one of the many things where the grown-ups were right, but where for one reason or another no one really seemed to put an effort into helping me be able to tell. So, let me be a person to say what I think here.

First, let’s be clear: even in my young naivete I wouldn’t have denied that the existence of language is important. And I was quite on board with writing being a useful tool, at least once I got deeper on all the math competition stuff. And while, perhaps, it would have been useful for someone to explicitly remark how writing and reading allows you to transmit information you couldn’t otherwise, that wouldn’t have seemed like a foreign idea to me either.

Rather, the “language affects how you think” idiom claims something stronger; that the specific language you have affects how you think. That I didn’t grasp; I thought that languages were interchangeable with each other - since, after all, you can translate text from one language to another.

But that’s just not true at all.

Imagine you hear an anthropologist reporting about a peculiar hunter-gatherer tribe that doesn’t have a word for lying. That doesn’t mean the people don’t lie, of course; oh no, deception, misleading, lying, all those still exist and are being pulled off like one would expect from any other human tribe. Their language just hasn’t developed far enough to have words for talking about those things.

You can see immediately that this would have practical consequences. For example, lying would presumably not be frowned upon as much as in most other societies.

(Because how would it be punished? You can’t exactly say to others “he lied to me!” and expect them to side with you, becasue you lack the word. And you probably can’t win them over by saying “he said things that he knew were not how things are even though he knew how things are so that I would not know how things are so that he could get what he wanted and I would not”, because (A) let’s be real, if your language doesn’t have a word for lying, you’re not going to be able to define the phenomenon on the spot, and (B) even if you could, that’s not quite as snappy, is it?)

Similarly, one might imagine a second hunter-gatherer tribe that has the word “lying”, but doesn’t have a word for accidentally conveying something false. You can see by contrast how that tribe would be different from the one before. For example, they might accuse others of lying even in cases of honest mistakes, and would find it harder to discuss ways in which people might erroneously arrive at false beliefs when communicating with others in good faith.

Then you can think of modern languages like English which, to our fortune, has words for both lying, deceiving, misleading, and all those other things.

It’s also not just a matter of which words exist in a language, but which are short and commonly used. For example, consider the word “false” and its Finnish translation, “epätosi”. A few important facts about that word:

(1) The Finnish word for “true” is “tosi”. “epä” means “not”. The word for “false” is thus literally “nottrue”.

(2) “epä” is not a common prefix. It is the sort of prefix most commonly used in technical contexts, like when a mathematician wants to say “Let S be a non-empty set…” (“Olkoon S epätyhjä joukko…”). Relatedly, “epätosi” has a pedantic connotation and is not a word you would use in spoken language, unless you are the sort of person who already talks about “non-empty sets”.

(3) The word is four syllables long, e-pä-to-si. The words for “true” (tosi) and “lie” (valhe) are, incidentally, two syllables each. In English, those are all single-syllable words.

Hence, in my view I’m not exaggerating much if I say that Finnish does not, for practical purposes, have a word for “false”. Indeed, I hardly see the word in Finnish text.

So we’ve seen that modern languages, English and Finnish, have clear shortcomings in the vocabulary around what I would consider fundamental for thinking, namely epistemics. (The fact that “epistemics” itself is a technical, rarely used word is another case in point; but in case you haven’t heard of it before, you hopefully picked up from the context that it’s about all these things like whether claims are true or false, people’s beliefs about things, processes by which people form and share their beliefs and so on.) And while we can make up for the lack of some words by inserting occassional parenthetical sentences to explain what we mean, it adds friction. Increase the friction, and people start thinking and talking less about things in that direction, reading less the sorts of essays that include dry explanatory parentheticals, just like how a ball won’t roll as far uphill when the terrain is rougher.

What’s worse, this friction shows up not just at the atomic level of words, but at all the higher layers of abstraction, too. Consider learning languages: Make the grammatical rules more complex, and people will need to spend more years of their English or Finnish classes focusing on the grammar, and the more people’s practice of language and communication will be about such syntactic trivialities. Make the spoken and written language more complex, and children will need more time before they’ve learned any language at all. I grant this is a rather narrow sense in which language affects thinking, but it’s quantitatively massively important.

And in the broadest, most abstract sense, language does affect the way you think, just not at the level my 15-year-old self was thinking of. It’s not that switching from Finnish to English makes you suddenly think in importantly different ways in your internal monologue just because the words and grammar are different, any more than you will start to program differently, on a fundamental level, after having learned the syntax of a new programming language. Rather, languages are humanity’s software architecture to enchance our thinking, with massive codebases and libraries for words, idioms and concepts; essays, articles, books; styles, worldviews, schools of thought. In many ways all that is the languages, and are part of the ongoing process of developing them, rather than merely something built on top of them. And eventually, they do something to your thinking.