Rshaw Language Autobiography

Ryan Shaw December 22, 2011

Many kids are born into a family that speaks a foreign language. They learn the language of their parents and, in most cases, also learn the language of the country where they grow up. These children may seem to always have an advantage. We think that these bilinguals have a extreme advantage over others, mostly because they can think in two different languages, and their vocabulary is almost doubled. This can may be untrue however. In some cases, kids who are bilingual, or even trilingual, are affected by how they speak one language, by another language.  

One example is when I was helping my Vietnamese foster cousin, Julia. She was having me edit her science paper and I noticed something, so I asked. “Julia, what are the differences between the sentence structure in Vietnamese and English?”

“Vietnamese has a different way of saying prepositions.” she said. So I re-read her paper, and I realized that the majority of mistakes that occurred were related to prepositional phrases. While this is just an small example, I’ve seen this in my other Vietnamese cousins, and I realized that it even affects the way that they speak. “If it affects the way that they write and speak, then could it affect how they think?” I asked myself. I dropped the idea at the time, but talking about language recently, has brought it back to my attention.

In the example, I realized how language might affect the way that we think, and I asked myself, Could it be that language affects not just how you think, but also, what you think?. I realized that I might be right. A little after I edited my cousin’s paper, I read 1984 by George Orwell. In it, there is a new way of speaking that the oppressive government is slowly forcing on its people, called, ‘newspeak’. A specific quote is from one of the supporters for newspeak in the book, “By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed.” Chaucer, Shakespeare,Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” -1984. This language is designed so that one simply doesn’t have the vocabulary to speak and think things that could be negative to the government. While I don’t think that other languages purposely do this, or that they are this restricted, I do think that certain languages allow you to only think in certain ways.

Another example is for Spanish, and the other Romance languages. Most other languages have the sentence structure of adjective-noun; In Latin languages, it is noun-adjective. This can also mean a different way of storytelling, tones, and even how the speakers talk.

This can be malicious in certain cases. Whenever I get a translation, I am always told that one word, “Is like...” then a meaning. This is because they never have a direct translation. It is hard to convey information this way, and the very foundations of communications is fragmented by this fact. The way that people speak has more to do than just communication however. If you only know how to think by using certain words, then you are virtually forced into thinking or not thinking certain things. This can affect how you act, and how you think.

Citations:

1984 by George Orwell