In this Youtube video “Lera Boroditsky, How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think” that lasted a bit more than an hour the speaker Lera Boroditsky shares some of her ideas on languages, cultures, and thinking. We should keep in mind though that her report aims first of all at entertaining a general public.

Yes, it has some distant reminiscence of the university lectures on phonetics, linguistic typology, comparative philology, and cultural studies. But it’s not systematic or historical; it doesn’t follow the language levels or any certain linguistic topic in particular. It is just a stream of funny and disconnected facts about the world languages followed by the assumptions regarding their possible influence on humans’ brain.

Why is that? It appears to me that elusiveness of the content dictates this loose structure of the video material – nothing can be stated for sure because there is no reliable proof. “Language influences thinking”, or does it? Or perhaps, it more affects the unconscious behavior instead, like gestures, posture, span of attention, strength of a voice, prejudices, preferences, space orientation etc.?

I can agree that a language has some impact on its speakers, and even the grammatical categories change the world in a way. Yet in my opinion, the extent of those influences and transformations is vague and incalculable.

I was interested in finding the dissertation of Prof. Boroditsky to see the topic of her own research. It turned out that her dissertation of 2001 centered on the phenomenon of time and its expression in English and Chinese.

I also found the critical article of 2007 written by David January and Edward Kako which “raises some theoretical and empirical issues for Boroditsky (2001) that challenge the validity of its experimental outcome and by extension its potential larger implications” (p.418). These authors report “six unsuccessful attempts to replicate the basic finding of Boroditsky (2001) that English speakers think of time as horizontal. Additionally, we point out some apparent empirical and theoretical inconsistencies in the original report that would pose a serious challenge to Boroditsky’s interpretation of her results, even if they were replicable” (p. 418).

I am actually not surprised at this criticism. These language-mind connections are too ephemeral to any researcher’s liking. Being a bilingual myself, for example, I cannot in my conscious mind declare that my two mother tongue languages influenced my mental, physical or psychological growths any different than they did my monolingual parents’ development.

It seems to me that Prof. Boroditsky was lucky to find and explore an interesting topic at the intersection of linguistics, psychology, and sociology, and used it to her advantage to become a successful stand-up popularizer of linguistic relativity.

But I am afraid it is not linguistics anymore; it’s a show business.

Reference

January, D., & Kako, E. (2007). Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001). Cognition, 104, 417-426. https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-stromswold/publications/January2007.pdf