Publishing Solutions Group

How Language Shapes Our Thoughts

Ken Scherpelz

Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist at Stanford University, believes that the language we speak determines the way we perceive the world. When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, it was the tallest bridge in the world. The French referred to it as an “immense, concrete giant”, while the Germans described how it “floated above the clouds” with “elegance and lightness.” Why the differing descriptions? In French, the word for bridge, pont, is masculine, while the German equivalent, Brücke, is feminine. Boroditsky contends that a “small fluke of grammar”—like the gender of nouns—“can have an effect on how people think about things in the world.”

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