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Last week I held a writing workshop for some of my young colleagues here in India. Although fluent in spoken English, they
struggle to get their thoughts and ideas on paper. One reason they find it hard is their preference for the passive voice.
Sentences written in the passive voice are often clunky and complex (compare: It was observed by me to I noticed). But no
matter how hard I try, I cant get them to shake this habit.
Its not their fault. They think in Hindi, and Hindi uses the passive voice much more than English does. In English, we know our
friends. Here in India, our friends are people known to us. In English, speakers seem to forge their own destinies. In Hindi,
things just seem to happen to them.
So does language shape character and culture, or is it the other way around? At one level it seems clear that a language
develops to reflect the concerns and preoccupations of the people who speak it. In India, for example, where the family is the
primary social framework, you never refer to just a sister-in-law. If you refer to your nanad, you mean your husbands sister,
while your jetani is your husbands older brothers wife and your bhabhi is your own brothers wife.
Sexism is enshrined in the language too. On the mothers side, all aunts are masis and all uncles are mamas. But on the
fathers side, where property is inherited, the uncles titles depend on their place in the line. The fathers sisters, meanwhile, are
all called bua: because they dont inherit, their birth order doesnt matter.
These linguistic biases accurately reflect the beliefs of a large segment of the culture, but I think they also contribute to the
preservation of those beliefs. Children who constantly identify relatives according to their specific place in the family hierarchy
unconsciously place value on that hierarchy. It matters that you are my tao (fathers elder brother) and not my masur (mothers
sisters husband); the distinction is more than verbal.
The idea that languages both reflect and reinforce social attitudes has been explored in other contexts. An economist named
Keith Chen designed a study to determine whether the language one speaks affects the likelihood that one will save money for
the future [2] . Chen found that people whose languages do not have a future tense, such as Chinese, are 30 percent more likely
to save [3] than speakers of languages like English, in which past, present, and future are clearly distinguished. Chens theory is
that people who see the future as distinct from the present (and therefore far away) are less likely to feel the need to prepare
for it.
Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has studied spatial awareness in aboriginal Australians. The
people of Pormpuraaw, for example, do not use words for left and right to situate an object in space but instead employ
directional terms like due southwest or northeast. Boroditsky has found that speakers of these aboriginal languages are
remarkably good at figuring out exactly where they are with respect to the four cardinal directions, even in unfamiliar terrains.
I recently attended a workshop on keeping children safe, designed especially for people who work with children with
disabilities. These kids are statistically more likely than other children to be sexually abused, in part because of the assumption