Workforce Language Services

The NYTimes Magazine preview just came out online, which takes a closer look at an intriguing idea: that our language (English, French, Japanese) shapes exactly how we think.

Let’s say that a person tells you “I saw my friend yesterday.” The English language doesn’t require the speaker to denote “male friend” or “female friend,” whereas Spanish, for example, obliges you to choose. Therefore gender explicitly becomes a part of the thinking process when processing language in Spanish, but not in English.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

A bigger question is: how does it work in practice?

Click here to read the full article.