Caleb Everett (Harvard University Press)
THE 7400 or so languages in use today speak to the fact that our species is primed to communicate. But while it is tempting to view language as merely a consequence of our extraordinary cognitive powers, Caleb Everett thinks there may be more going on.
In A Myriad of Tongues: How languages reveal differences in how we think, he argues that language itself may shape our understanding of the world and our experience of time and space. To put it another way, the language we speak may influence the way we think.
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Such a provocative idea might have been controversial a few decades ago, says Everett, because linguists restricted themselves to analysing languages of industrialised, higher-income countries. These are relatively similar, so they encourage speakers to think along broadly similar lines, he says. But we now know they fall short of representing the variety of languages spoken today 鈥� and the more we learn about understudied tongues, the more evidence we find for the complicated interplay between language and thinking.
Take Berinmo, a language of Papua New Guinea. Unlike English speakers, explains Everett, Berinmo speakers struggle to remember whether an object they were shown earlier was blue or green 鈥� perhaps because that language doesn鈥檛 distinguish between these colours. But it does make a formal distinction between yellowish-greens and other greens, and Berinmo speakers typically find it easy to remember which of these colours an object they saw earlier was painted, while English speakers struggle to do this.
Language also influences how we think about objects, writes Everett. Yucatec Maya, spoken in Mexico, Guatemala and northern Belize, encourages its speakers to classify objects according to their material properties rather than their function. Where an English speaker might group a plastic comb and a wooden comb together and exclude a wooden stick, a Yucatec Maya speaker would usually group the wooden objects together. To do so, they would often carefully evaluate objects, checking weight, malleability, taste and smell. English-speaking people in the US get the information they need by sight alone, Everett explains.
As a professor of anthropology and psychology at the University of Miami in Florida, Everett is a confident guide to this new perspective, and with good reason: he grew up with the field from childhood. His father, Daniel Everett, is a linguist famous for his research into the culture and language of the Pirah茫 people of the Amazon basin.
This language (also called Pirah茫) has many striking features influencing the way its speakers view the world. Its lack of number words, for instance, makes it impossible to measure time in quantifiable units. The young Caleb accompanied his father on research trips. As he recounts: 鈥淚 have spent more evenings and afternoons than I could count swimming Piibooxio xigahapaati [upriver] in the cool waters of the Maici鈥�. It is easy to imagine this kindling his fascination with language and cognition.
His book, then, celebrates two main subjects: understudied languages, with the fascinating insights they offer, and the careful work of linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and others to explore the way language influences our thinking.
As Everett stresses, this work is vital as we live through a language extinction event predicted to see the loss of about 30 per cent of today鈥檚 tongues by 2100. His book makes it clear this is more than just a tragedy for local communities. Given the insights that languages offer into the human mind, their disappearance is a loss for us all.
Colin Barras is a science writer based聽in Ann Arbor, Michigan
