SUMMARY PAPER

READING CIRCLE #3

TOPIC 4: Could your language affect your ability to save money?

KEY QUESTIONS:
1. Does language influence decision-making and overall behaviors?
2. Does culture have an additional influence on the different saving behaviors of different
families?
3. What other psychological factors influence people using future languages to have a
negative effect on their saving behavior?
4. Is there a connection of this theory to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity?
5. What are other differences in behavior between people using future and futureless
languages?

KEY PASSAGES:
“Interestingly enough, when you start to crank the data, these pockets of futureless language
speakers all around the world turn out to be, by and large, some of the world's best savers.”
- This passage is important to emphasize because it insinuates that language affects a lot
of things, one of which is our financial behavior. In the study, you can see differences in
financial attitudes between the richest countries in the world. Looking at the list of
OECD countries, there are huge differences in savings behavior, with Luxembourg being
the top of the list and the US falling behind.

“Could how you speak about time, could how your language forces you to think about time,
affect your propensity to behave across time?”
- This quote is important because it insinuates the subtle influence on how people view
the future, which in turn, may slightly influence our savings behavior. In the study, it
studied the influences of speaking a futured and futureless language, and while the
language itself most likely does not affect savings behavior, how it influences us on how
far we disassociate from the future. Futured languages have a grammar that dissociates
the future from the present and makes the future seem like a very different event, while
futureless language speakers are more likely to associate both the present and the
future as identical.

“Can we push this data even further? Yes, because I just told you, we actually collect a lot of
health data as economists.”
- This quote is worth remembering because it shows how language’s subtle influence on
how we view the future does not only affect financial behavior, but also health.
Languages that have obligatory future markers such as Germanic Languages and Korean
have a tendency to make speakers disassociate themselves, so the future seems farther
than it actually is, while futureless languages like Mandarin or Japanese are more likely
to have speakers who associate the future with the present and therefore, be more
cautious of the actions of the present. It was found that futureless language speakers are

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 less willing to smoke, less likely to be obese, wear condoms in their sexual encounters,
and in general, be more cautious of the potentially harmful effects of current pleasures.

KEYWORDS:

Saving Behavior
- These are the determinants of financial knowledge such that bearers of this information
are able to act in order to practice competent financial literacy and financial
management.

Free Trade
- Trade policies and environment that does not aim to restrict the flow of imports and
exports but rather encourages them in order to exponentially increase without being
fettered.
GDP
- Gross domestic product is the value of all goods and services produced in a country in a
given period of time.

Behavioral economics
- The combination of psychology and economics determines the outcomes that give off
the most to least utility while understanding the decision-making processes of
individuals and institutions which make these decisions.

Nudge
- The suggestion that positive reinforcement often gets to influence behaviors of how
institutions act and think.

Futured Language
- Languages that would linguistically refer to the future and present using the same words
and tenses

Futureless Language
- Languages that would linguistically refer to the future and present as categorically
different with variations in tone, words, syntax, and tenses.

GEOGRAPHICAL, CULTURAL, OR HISTORICAL CONTEXT:

History of the OECD
As stated in the TED Talk by Keith Chen, OECD countries are the richest, most
industrialized countries in the world. To give a background on what the OECD is, it stands for
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Starting in 1948 after World War II,
what was formerly known as the Organization for European Economic Cooperation aimed to
help European governments recognize their economic independence. Currently, there are 38
countries that are members of the organization which are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada,
Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany,

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Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg,
Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain,
Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States. In this organization, they
collect, analyze, and report on economic growth for its members in order to balance the impact
of economic growth on the environment (Amadeo, 2021).

In what parts of the world are the OECD members from

The members of the OECD are countries from many different parts of the world. To put
this into perspective, From Europe, there are 26 countries which make up the majority of the
members. From Asia there are 3 countries, from North America there are 2 countries, from
South America there are 4 countries, and from Oceania, there are 2 countries.

Chinese Language
As the oldest written language in the world, Chinese dates back to over 4000 years ago.
In China, there are over 200 dialects. Chinese speakers usually make use of a dialect that
belongs to one of these 7 groups of languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, Xiang, Min, Gan, Wu, and
Kejia. However, Chinese citizens are taught a common, official language, Mandarin (“What is the
Chinese language?,” 2020). As stated before, a futureless language does not differentiate
present events from future events. In light of this, Mandarin does not need any precision once a
timeframe has been established, all Chinese verbs have a single form (Su, 2019).

What makes a language futured and futureless

In the TED Talk, Keith Chen used English and Chinese as the main languages to compare
what a futured and futureless language is. A futured language is said to differentiate events
between present and future, however, a futureless language equals events from present to
future. In other words, a futureless language like Chinese does not divide time between present
and future unlike what futured languages like English does. This does not mean that Chinese
language speakers are not able to comprehend the difference between present and future, it is
only that their language does not require the separation of present and future when speaking.
What makes a language futured and futureless is the use of different verbs. According to Keith
Chen, European languages range from a tendency to rarely distinguish present and future time

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(like Finnish) to languages like French, which have separate and obligatory “future” forms of
verbs (Chen, 2013). An example of these verbs is how we usually say “it is” when talking about
the present, and “it will be” when talking about the future. Western languages need to follow
subject-verb agreements which would make the language grammatically wrong if not followed.
Comparing this to Chinese, a statement could be in any timeframe, express a question, and even
be an answer (Su, 2019).

CONNECTION/LINK TO CURRENT EVENTS IN THE PH OR ASEAN & ADDITIONAL INFOGRAPHICS:

The Filipino language is considered to be a futured language since the future is
expressed clearly from the present. In the Filipino language, for example, we use “umulan
kahapon”, “umuulan ngayon”, and “uulan bukas”. If we translate this into English, it translates to
it rained yesterday, it is raining now, and it will rain tomorrow. Thus, the Filipino language is a
futured language.

On the other hand, other Southeast Asia countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand,
Singapore, and Cambodia all use futureless languages. In Indonesia, they use the future tense to
express an event that will occur after another event, whether it is the past, present, or future.
Meanwhile, the Malay language, also known as Bahasa Melayu, does not have different types of
tenses to specify what happened in the past, in the present, or in the future. In the Malay
language, they usually add words to differentiate aspects of time.

Moreover, in the case of Thailand, the use of tense forms is not used in their Thai
language. The Thai language only uses tenses by considering the tense and time words, and the
context of words. Meanwhile, for the Khmer language used by Cambodians, tenses can be
understood through context and adverbs. Lastly, for Singapore, there are four official languages
spoken which are English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil.

As stated by Keith Chen, some of the world’s best savers are usually futureless
languages. In the case of ASEAN countries including the Philippines, it is somehow evident that
countries with futureless languages are better savers than those who have futured languages.
The figure below shows the Savings (% of GDP) of Southeast Asia countries.

Figure 1: Savings per % of GDP of Southeast Asia countries

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 As shown in the figure, the highest percentage was Singapore with 40.24%, followed by
Indonesia with 29.61%, Thailand with 27.8%, Cambodia with 25.93%, the Philippines with
24.86%, and lastly, Malaysia with 24.07%. From these data, we can conclude that Keith Chen’s
study is apparent in Southeast Asia countries.

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 References

Amadeo, K. (2021, May 3). How the OECD can help you. The Balance. Retrieved December
7, 2021, from
https://www.thebalance.com/organization-economic-cooperation-development-3
305871.

Abidin, N. Z., Ismayatim, W. F. A., & Yee, W. L. (2016, September). Involving time reference
English to Malay (Bahasa ... - IJHSSI.
http://www.ijhssi.org/papers/v5(9)/J059058068.pdf.

Chen, M. K. (2013). The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings
Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets. American Economic Review,
103(2), 690–731. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.2.690

DevelopmentAid. (2021). Retrieved December 8, 2021, from DevelopmentAid website:

https://www.developmentaid.org/#!/news-stream/post/94333/what-is-the-oecd

Elkins, K. (2015, August 3). The language you speak may affect your ability to get rich.
Business Insider.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-language-affects-wealth-2015-7.

Indonesian tenses: Expressing the past, present, and future. IndonesianPod101.com Blog.
(2021, July 14).
https://www.indonesianpod101.com/blog/2021/07/08/indonesian-tenses/?fbclid=I
wAR3ZkxWAz901Q4QemSmHUs9p8fJnZM8DsFoGahX1xFglg1BylXFC0-S0ifc.

Lane, A. (n.d.). Time Concepts in Thai language. Learn Thai Style.

https://learnthaistyle.com/time-concepts-thai-language/.

Savings, percent of GDP in South East Asia. TheGlobalEconomy.com. (n.d.).

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/savings/South-East-Asia/.

Seah, J. (2017, November 17). A guide to Singapore's languages. Culture Trip.

https://theculturetrip.com/asia/singapore/articles/a-guide-to-singapores-languages
/.

Su, Q. G. (2019, February 27). Expressing timeframes through verb tenses in Chinese.
ThoughtCo. Retrieved December 8, 2021, from
https://www.thoughtco.com/mandarin-timeframes-2279615.

What is the Chinese language? (2020, December 10). Retrieved December 8, 2021, from
Ninchanese website: https://ninchanese.com/chinese-language/