How language shapes the way we think | Lera Boroditsky | TED

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My mother tongue is Persian, and I speak English fluently. I learned driving on the right side of the road in Iran. When I moved to South Africa, I had to drive on the left side of the road. No problem so far. When I had passengers, and we spoke in English in the car, all went well. When some of my friends switch to speaking in Persian in the car, I subconsciously moved to the right side of the road scaring everyone in the car and on the road! Then I moved to Australia, and the same thing happens every now and then!

I really envy the people who so easily and calmly articulate their thoughts

When I speak French especially in Paris I don’t mind someone nodding halfway in to my sentence just after I said the noun and verb, but when I started learning Japanese… it changed everything. Not only I became more patient while listening, but also as a speaker, because you don’t get the verb till the last word in Japanese.

This is why learning more languages is such a benefit. Not only I find better ways to communicate, it opened my whole brain to think in different ways. One language simply doesn't allow that. But as soon as I learned the 2nd language, I knew there are 3, 4, and even million different ways of everything.

"To have a second language is to have a second soul." -Charlemagne, for someone who speaks three languages fluently, this is so true. As a trilingual, you watch movies from three different countries, read books from three different languages, learn cultures of three origins, and forge relationships with from diverse cultures. Indeed, when you learn a new language, you acquire a new reality of something different, or a soul. Knowing more than one or two languages also helps you understand the history of humanity and how some cultures and people act and think in different ways. <3

If one culture couldn’t discover algebra because of their language missing number words, I wonder what our language misses and what we have yet to discover due to that.

100% true. I speak several languages and when you shift from one to another, your brain and your mind shift to another way of thinking. You start expressing in a complete different ways. I remember one time that I was in work g in Brazil. One of the local engineers wanted to practice his English with me, although we had been speaking in Portuguese since my arrival. As soon as I started speaking English to him, I saw the surprise in his face and he told me: You voice is completely different in English than in Portuguese which was very curious to me because I never noticed it. I have noticed though that Spanish language is a very descriptive language. You just don’t say a thing. You have to describe it. English is simpler in that way. It lacks the description of things but the pronunciation of words is more complex.

You've gotta respect the amount of research that has gone into this speech🙏

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This is one of the best TED talks I have listened to, being able to speak more than one language- I can definitely relate to this, I was actually thinking about this before & she presented the facts, Thanks a lot. I think people would also relate to the fact that speaking different dialects of the same language can very much influence the way you think & behave. I feel there are more 'aggressive' dialects and 'kinder' dialects of the same language.

So amazing! I'm living in Viet Nam and in my language there are different ways to call another in a conversation, it's not just "I-You" like in English. We call people who are older, much older, younger, male, female, ect. by separate subjects (anh, chị, cô, chú, bác, ông, bà,...) At first I thought it was so complicated, but after your talk, I realize that the way we call each other create more close-knit relationships among people. That's the reason why Vietnamese people are so friendly and warmhearted.

My husband says that even my voice becomes different when I speak another language))) When I speak French, he calls it "Sweet Katyusha", when I speak Russian - "Tough Katyusha"))

This is very interesting. As someone who speaks a few languages I've become aware of my personality differences every time I switch, it's incredibly amusing really. Great talk!

That is one of the most interesting TED talks I’ve ever watched! It’s shocking how vast is the diversity of ways of thinking and you never find the most distinguished one because they all are extraordinary. I speak 3 languages and can say that it's so true that your personality changes as soon as you speak another language and I can see how weird it can sound for someone who does have the same experience.

That was interesting. It made me remember this thoughts: I’m Japanese, born and raised in Japan and when I went to the US, I got a bit surprised how addition, subtraction and so on are described in a complex way in English (it also requires more syllables in English). People might think asian people are good at calculation and if that tendency is true, I think one of the reasons is language differences.

1:44 Does the language we speak shapes the way we think? 2:33 Aboriginal community from Australia 4:00 Example of location, point southeast 8:00 German and Spanish 13:38 final thought

She is so gloriously smart and intelligent... She's beautiful.

One of my favorite talk so far! I love The way she conveys her messages, how she speaks slowly but shaped. What an immersive speak!

Thanks a lot for this video, I found new examples and new perspectives on the statement "we are how we think and speak". And when you listen to a person who speaks another language dramatically different from yours, you can see the differences in culture, sometimes misundersandings, just only because you think differently. Perfect! This is one of my favourite things to think about and observe. I also can't disagree that the more languages you speak, the wider your mind is (or the bigger your soul is). But I have never thought about future: a bit terrifying prospect to realize that some of the languages will die, or some of them will transform influenced by another more popular language.