Your Worldview Is Your Language Experience

What is a linguistic picture of the world and how it affects your worldview?

In different cultures people express themselves differently, it depends on a lot of aspects of their lives and history, but on high-level – it is related to various structures of native languages; each language has its own historical experience and view of the world around them, and persons with different native language actually see the world differently.

For example, let us take a look at Russian and Latvian languages. The Russian language has three genders: feminine, masculine and neutral, on other hand, the Latvian language has only two: feminine and masculine. It means that Latvian speakers see all objects in the world in two genders, everything is either feminine or masculine.

(Credit:https://zen.yandex.ru/media/)

While Russian-speaking people have objects without gender at all and can define them differently. Word “sun” in Latvian (saule) has feminine gender, in Russian (солнце) it has no gender, it is neutral, but more often it is considered as masculine. So, in Latvian culture sun is considered as a Goddess and more related to women. The sun is a very important sign on women’s cultural clothes, and Latvian speakers see and describe this object more in a feminine way. In Russian culture sun considered and described as more masculine, therefore in folklore sun is in a male form. Also, the moon is feminine for Russian speakers and masculine for Latvian speakers, therefore in Latvian culture and mythology Sun is Moon’s wife, which is the opposite of Slavic-Russian mythology. This example works for many different languages, not only for these two. So, all these show us, our perception depends on our native language; we can see and think about absolutely the same objects in opposite ways at the same time.

Another great example of a linguistic picture of the world is in Australia, where the Aborigines are living with a language named – Kuuk Thaayorre. In this language, they do not have concepts about “left” and “right”, instead they use directions; north, east, south, west. So, instead of left, right hand, or leg, they are saying “southeast leg”. Instead of a question: “Hello, how are you?” they are saying “Which way you going?” and the answer is “north-northeast, how about you?”. Any speaker of this language can with no doubt at any moment answer to you where which direction is and it is not a hard question for them, but for most other people it will be. They are so great at knowing the correct direction because their language trained them on that.

(Credit:https://alchetron.com/Kuuk-Thaayorre-language)

Our worldview has a lot of differences like these and your language is that tool that shapes the way how you see this world, how you are connected with it, with people around you, and how deep you see various things and objects.

Charlemagne once said: “To know two languages is to possess a second soul”.

Sources:

• Saules zÄ«me. (n.d.). Valoda.Ailab. http://valoda.ailab.lv/kultura/kultura/orn09.htm
• Kuuk Thaayorre language, alphabet and pronunciation. (n.d.). Omniglot. https://omniglot.com/writing/kuukthaayorre.htm
• Пешкова, Н. П., & Ибрагимова, И. В. (2013, August 26). ЯЗЫКОВАЯ КАРТИНА МИРА: ОСНОВНЫЕ ПРИЗНАКИ, ТИПОЛОГИЯ И ФУНКЦИИ – Современные проблемы науки и образования (научный журнал). science-education. https://www.science-education.ru/ru/article/view?id=9954
• Iriskulov, F. (n.d.). The Linguistic Picture of the World in the Constructed Languages – a Research Project. Academia.Edu. https://www.academia.edu/6668420/The_Linguistic_Picture_of_the_World_in_the_Constructed_Languages_a_Research_Project
• Boroditsky, L. (2018, April 11). How language shapes the way we think. TED Talks. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think