Paper 4 Question 2

 There are various types of languages around the world. Language is essential in order to be able to communicate with those around us. It allows us to gain knowledge and information from the society around us. Language also shapes our social identity and plays a great role in the way individuals think. The Standford University online magazine written by a Standford researcher, it talks about how language is able to shape how we think. The Standford researcher uses facts and information from Lera Boroditsky who has done research on multiple different languages. 

Lera Boroditsky in all of her research has one particular question which is if language shapes the way that we think? She focuses primarily on different people who speak different languages. These include Spanish speakers popping balloons, Russian speakers sorting shades of blue, and Australian kids who had to avoid a crocodile. With this information, Boroditsky wanted to find differences between the cultures and how they perceive the certain concepts to which they were assigned. Language is also often impacted by the cultures and groups someone belongs to which shapes the words they use. The cultures can have a different set of words or perhaps not as many words when describing how they think. Boroditsky’s goal was to understand the different mindset of the participants and how their mind processes information. 

A hypothesis that can be supported in the extract is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was first made by Edward Sapir in 1929. It states that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ worldwide cognition, and the people’s perceptions are relative to their spoken language. It is supported in the extract due to the writer focusing on how other people think. One example used that can support this hypothesis is, “In the Yagua language of Peru, there are five distinct grammatical forms of the past tense.” When being compared to English, the only forms possible are past, present, and future. 

The extract, it also focuses on the differences languages have when they are placing blame upon something. It uses the example in English of saying how if a cup was dropped on the floor the phrase you would say is “She broke the cup.” However, in comparison to Japanese or Spanish, you would say that the “cup broke itself.” Which is a completely different meaning from what we are normally used to. The one language is blaming the other while the other one isn’t so does the language think differently about what has happened? The different ways a sentence may be written could change the meaning entirely. 

This goes hand and hand with the universalism theory by Rik Pinxten. The extract is proving the fact that people are able to think a different way about the same situation and don’t share the same cognitive processes. Which then is the opposite of Pinxten’s theory. He believed the opposite and that a given value, behavior, theory, or treatment will be the same across groups independent of culture, race, ethnicity, gender, and other social identities. 

Language is essential in the way we communicate in our day-to-day life. Our language shapes the way that we think and the way our mind processes. People in different cultures and who speak different languages are often limited to the number of words to which they can respond when they were being tested by Boroditsky. Every processes information differently and different languages and cultures have different rules.