Are you a different person when you speak a different language?

Our language changes how we perceive the world and behave, a theory known as linguistic relativity.

As I prepare to travel to Spain, I want to reflect on how different languages can lead us to perceive and act differently.

After all, as my wife tells me, "Dui, you're a different person in Spanish!"

.. am I?

Richness of vocabulary in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

It's a BJJ sparring session.

In English, I do ashi-waza with double-koichi, my training partner steps away, and I do a kazushi, then use te-waza with a two-on-one on their left arm, and transition to a pinch headlock, transition to a shoulder crunch and then clamp guard.

In Portuguese, the same would be described as: I try to trip my opponent, then I try again, then I grab his left arm and put him in closed guard with his head in, then with his head out, then with one of my legs kind of out.

A funny thing about Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu is that, despite having "Brazillian" in its name and being the country of its birth, Americans have incorporated a rich vocabulary of BJJ positions and nuances that Brazilians have yet to adopt. Americans even added a number of Japanese words to their BJJ vocabulary!

This means that some nuances of positions that exist in English don't yet exist in Portuguese. Unsurprisingly, that impacts a fighter's ability to fight effectively, meaning fighters who speak only Portuguese are less effective than equivalent fighters who speak English because of their language.

That's not as surprising as it seems at first. Expertise is often partnered with nuance and detail in knowledge, which relies on separate concepts of expression.

Let's start this exploration with one of the most famous words that exist in Portuguese but not in any other language: Saudade.

"Saudade": The melancholy feeling of longing for something lost

In Portuguese, "Saudade" is the word for the feeling you have when you tell someone, "I'll miss you," and then you actually feel the, uh, missing of the person.

In English, when you miss someone you feel .. sad, melancholy. You have a longing, a remembrance of older and happier times. But the negative feeling itself is a mix of sadness and blueness.

In Portuguese, you feel "Saudade."

Like the BJJ position in Portuguese, trying to describe a closed guard with the head out and a leg kind of out instead of an English "Clamp," in English, you feel sadness and melancholy with memories of the past, and in Portuguese, you feel "Saudade."

Like in BJJ, having a word for clamp makes you a better fighter, in Portuguese, having a word for Saudade makes you a better .. misser of things that English doesn't have a word for.

But does feeling a mix of feelings and thoughts instead of "Saudade" lead Americans and British to behave differently from Portuguese and Brazilians?

Possibly.

Emotional Intelligence and vocabulary

One relatively well-established thing is that our emotional regulation largely depends on our emotional awareness, which in turn relies on a rich vocabulary.

In practice, we don't feel "sad" or "angry." – these are labels we create for different types of affect we identify in ourselves.

In Lisa Feldman Barret's book How Emotions Are Made (there's also a popular TED talk), she talks about how we feel different feelings that go up and down spectrums based on positive or negative affect. Then, we rate them as a particular feeling and label them.

She also posits something important: the labels we use to define our feelings vary by language and culture.

The richness of these labels affects how we perceive our feelings. There's a difference between perceiving yourself three times as angry and perceiving yourself first as frustrated, then frazzled, then distressed.

Language can shape our perception ability, and that is fascinating. This was explored once in a scientific experiment comparing Russian and English speakers' ability to distinguish hues of blue.

In "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination," experimenters asked Russians to discriminate between light blue ("голубой" [goluboy]) and dark blue ("синий" [siniy]), which they could do faster than English speakers in a timed test.

While it's not necessarily scientific that the difference in color detection applies to feelings and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu positions, the concept is the same: language variations lead to perception variations.

English and French differences for "Pattern" and "Normalement"

The book Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sanders explores these and other interesting linguistic and cognitive connections.

A book written in parallel in both English and French, it spends some time discussing the implications of the lack of the word "Pattern" in French.

To make things concrete, let’s take an example. English speakers fluently and effortlessly use the word “pattern” to describe regularities, exact or approximate, that they perceive in the world. However, if they wish to talk about such phenomena in French, they will soon learn, to their frustration, that there is no French word that exactly covers this very clear zone of conceptual space. And thus, depending on details of what they mean, they will have to choose among French words such as “motif”, “régularité”, “structure”, “système”, “style”, “tendance”, “habitude”, “configuration”, “disposition”, “périodicité”, “dessin”, “modèle”, “schéma”, and perhaps others.

Hofstadter, Douglas R.; Sander, Emmanuel. Surfaces and Essences (p. 81). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

It then similarly explores the English's lack for the word "Normalement":

Here are a few examples that show typical uses of the word, and that give a sense for the wide variety of translations it needs in order to be rendered accurately in English:

Normalement, Danny doit être arrivé à la maison maintenant.
Hopefully, Danny’s back home by now.

Normalement, on va courir à 7 heures ce soir, non ?
Unless we change our plans, we’ll be taking our run at 7 this evening, right?

Normalement, nous devions passer deux semaines en Bretagne.
If there hadn’t been a hitch, we would have spent two weeks in Brittany.

French speakers will be just as puzzled by English’s lack of a single word for the obvious, monolithic-seeming concept expressed by the word “normalement” as English speakers are puzzled by French’s lack of a single word for the obvious, monolithic-seeming concept that is embodied in the word “pattern”. What is monolithic is in the eye of the beholder.

Hofstadter, Douglas R.; Sander, Emmanuel. Surfaces and Essences (p. 82). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

In both cases, they explore how the lack of a word forces you to describe it using the other available words, which the authors describe as linguistic richness and poverty.

If our thoughts depend on the symbols they manipulate, and those symbols are linguistic in nature, then linguistic richness and poverty would likely imply the same for thought.

But can that linguistic difference significantly impact behavior?

Do people who speak Chinese save more money?

In Keith Chen's paper "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets", the author talks about how not having a future tense in our language, such as Chinese, may lead us to make better long-term decisions. From the paper's summary:

Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation.

We all have a bias called temporal discounting – how much we value the present over the future. You can get some interesting data about people's different levels of temporal discounting by asking them to choose more money later vs now.

For example, if you are given a choice between receiving $100 today or $100 in a month, you will most likely take the money today. That’s an easy decision. However, given a choice between $100 today and $105 in a month, what will you do? Most people would rather have $100 today than $105 in a month. Some people would even take $100 today over $150 next month.

Sharot, Tali. The Optimism Bias: Why we're wired to look on the bright side (p. 120). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

What's interesting is that, although Tali Sharot doesn't talk about the language differences when discussing temporal discounting, she does mention in a study that our temporal discounting is correlated to how well we can imagine ourselves in the future, given fMRI studies.

An fMRI study published in 2006 aimed to link the way we perceive our future selves with the way we discount time.19 While their brains were scanned, participants were requested to evaluate the characteristics of both their current selves and their potential selves ten years from now. Later, outside the scanner, participants were asked to make decisions that would reveal their temporal preferences. Choices such as “Would you rather get ten dollars today or twelve dollars in a week?” and “Would you prefer ten dollars today or fifteen dollars in two months?” were presented. The findings showed that people who tended to choose a small gain immediately rather than a larger one in the future had greater differences in their brain activity when thinking of their current selves versus their future selves. Participants who did not discount the future much had only minor differences in activation when evaluating their current and future selves.

Sharot, Tali. The Optimism Bias: Why we're wired to look on the bright side (p. 126). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

It seems that how well we can see ourselves in the future affects our temporal discounting and helps us make better long-term decisions.

And it also seems like how well we can see ourselves in the future depends, among other things, on our language.

So moving to Japan may help you save money and eat healthy in ways you didn't anticipate: by the effects of its language on your thinking about yourself.

Conclusion: Several different "you"s and "me"s

Becoming fluent in a language is hard work. Many of us will have learned a single other language, often through immigration.

Thinking in a non-native language is also challenging: many of us will think in one language and internally translate to the other instead of thinking in both languages.

But surely language does change what we think when we think in it. Even mannerisms and reactions vary depending on which language we're interacting with, after all – same as other cultural changes.

In summary, languages vary in their linguistic richness and poverty. This, in turn, changes how we can express ourselves, which is a reflection of changes in how we think.

This linguistic poverty changes how we perceive the world in more or less detail, changing how we act. For example, Russians perceive shades of blue more easily than English speakers, given their two words for hues of blue.

Interestingly, even biases like temporal discounting are subject to our language, with languages without a future tense likely influencing us to save more and smoke less.

I'm not sure how practical any of this information is, given my only advice so far was a tongue-in-cheek "move to Japan."

But, at the very least, it may say something about how our vocabulary mastery reflects our mastery of the world.

And about the importance of words in how we live.