The weird way language affects our sense of time and space - BBC Future

By Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren 4th November 2022

The languages we speakcan have asurprising impacton the way wethinkaboutthe worldand even howwe move through it.
If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? And how would you
line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would
you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?

These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to
be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak. It appears that language can have a fascinating
effect on the way we think about time and space.

The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the
heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are
our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely
shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a
growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and
culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a
linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.

It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a
cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember
things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of
different things, be it gender, movement or colour.
Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in
which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time
which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the
thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any
differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that
language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates
our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might
move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to
right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English
language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too.
Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the
same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most
likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.

Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and
down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so
that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with
how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the
page to the bottom.

This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our
cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal
information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language.

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Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who
speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different
languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the
UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the
same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."

Bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages
from an early age.

In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the
future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front
time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and
Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future,
it must be to our rear.

In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future, they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people
who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures.
Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past
ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day".
Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward
conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.

Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in
English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday
"short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking – people conceptualise
"lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all
people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in
Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My
first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view.
Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening".

And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than
universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-
dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but
"big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".

The same is also true in Spanish.

These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking?
Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two
points of time cannot swap places – there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating
around – and are potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of
time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in
creating it," he says.

Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its
different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the
past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general
relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is
a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously –
as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been –
and still is – holding back physics.

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Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three
simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But
in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the
future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where
external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on
holiday next month".

But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless"
might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese,
Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the
future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage
speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.

He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused
activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had
accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more
likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when
controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group
of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.

But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world – influencing how we
orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference
frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people
in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – to talk about even
mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame
– the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference
objects.

But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation – such as "next
to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of
reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they
mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when
facing it?

And this can shape how we think – and navigate.

Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos
involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened
in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other
hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a
car".

As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we
think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language
is "better" than another.

But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And
while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and
a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.