The Difficulty with Effective Communication

Today I watched a TED Talk titled, "How Language Shapes the Way we Think". The speaker, Lera Boroditsky, explains about communication across languages, and how languages influences its speakers. I already know that language is an ineffective method of communication, and find localization an interesting topic, so I was interested to hear her perspective. And it provided me some useful thought on how others outside of oneself may think or perceive the same text or speech differently.

About the Talk

The nature of the talk was more educational, informative, and insightful than argumentative. Boroditsky used several devices to serve the information in an understandable manner, and flowed them together seamlessly in a lighthearted and comedic manner. She paced the talk in a consistent manner, having no lulls in her speech, but also little time to think about what she'd said before she'd moved on to the next topic.

First, she explained that there are approximately 7,000 languages, which each have their own syntax, sounds, and vocabularies. A specific language she mentioned was that of the Kuuk Thaayorre tribe of Cape York in Australia. The language has no equivalent to "left" or "right", or other words for relative position. Instead, they use unchanging cardinal directions. It's even woven into their greetings. The benefit it provides the tribe is an incredible sense of orientation. Boroditsky accentuated this by asking everyone in the audience to point in a particular cardinal direction...only for everyone to point in random directions.
The next two examples she gave were how left-to-right and right-to-left language speakers arrange items differently, and that some languages don't have counting numbers, making it hard for them to calculate and compare quantities.
The last two examples involved more about the perception that languages create. Some languages, Boroditsky mentioned, categorize color differently. Russian was one of them, which sees lighter and darker blues as unique colors, and can quickly distinguish between them. An English speaker makes no such distinction, but also has more difficulty distinguishing shades of blue. She used the blue of the background screen as a makeshift prop for this explanation. Then, Boroditsky explained how the gendered pronouns of some language change how their speakers describe the object. Masculine pronouns cause the speaker to prefer masculine words to describe the object, and feminine pronouns lead to use of feminine adjectives.
The last example was about how language can change our perception of events. Boroditsky gave the scenario of a vase breaking. In English, the phrase use would be, "They broke the vase". Even though it was an accident, the syntax implies blame and even intent, leading an English speaker to better remember "who did it". In other language, specifically Spanish, she mentioned, the construction is more like, "The vase broke [itself]". No blame is placed, even though it happened because of another person, so they'll more likely remember "what happened".

The final thought Boroditsky left the audience with is that most research and studies are in the English language, leaving out the unique perspectives of almost all other languages and speakers. Having only one way of thinking and communicating creates, as she said, a "narrow and biased" understanding of the world. So she left them with three questions: "Why do I think the way that I do?", "How could I think differently?", and "What thoughts do I wish to create?"

The Takeaway

The topics and examples Boroditsky presented were effective at explaining how language shapes the minds of its speakers. Each one is meant to make the listener wonder what it may be like to have been raised to think and act so differently. It also made me wonder if what I say gets across the way I expect. Even among speakers of the same language, the context they've heard certain words in, and therefore what those words mean to them, can be completely different. The way vocabulary changes over time, and the experiences people have had, can change how they think and see the world. Perhaps I should ask myself those three questions next time there's a misunderstanding.

Sources

https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think/

Additional Reading

https://legendsoflocalization.com/ - A favorite website of mine, dedicated to video game localizations.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LocalizationTropes - Some wiki articles about localization.