What it's Like to Speak a Different Language- Claire Riley

A question our class has taken a day trying to answer has been: "Do the conventions of our language shape our perceptions of reality?" Using the resources given by Mr. Johnson and a special friend of mine who happens to be native to the French language as well as the English, I intend to get to the bottom of this question.

First, I'd like to look at the idea of being bilingual and the effects that may have on someone's mind and thoughts. To go in depth, I asked my friend Sarah Pineau who is fluent in French what language she thinks in.

"I think in English. I think I think in English because my really early childhood was in America, and I spend a lot of my time relating with my American friends. My parents...I know they think in French. Probably because they grew up in France. And I'm pretty sure my brother thinks in English because he also spent his childhood in America"(Pineau). So from Sarah's standpoint, the language a person would speak is most likely connected with what language they learned first.

We also have to look at the idea that Sarah and her family have 2 complete sets of vocabulary to identify with. Does this mean that she knows words in French that she can't understand in English...or vice versa? I wanted to expand on this idea from besides simple metaphors that Lera Boroditsky, associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego from our Slate.com article discussed. Sarah explains: "I didn't know what the word 'crush' meant 'till I was in like fifth grade...'cause I never heard of it before. So like some words I didn't know and I had to adjust." Hearing this I was dumbfounded since I grew up with the word 'crush' being thrown around everywhere! Sarah on the other hand had only known French until about third grade. This means that Sarah never quite thought about some boy she liked the same way kids like me did when we were young. She never actually had a word for that, changing her perception.

There may also be differences in thoughts and ideas when talking about a single KNOWN word in every language. For example, the "key" experiment that was used in the Psychology.com article. German speakers used harsher words when describing the word key, such as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, or useful. Spanish speakers, however, used graceful words like golden, intricate, little, and lovely. I wanted to use this test on Sarah to see if I could get an idea of what a French speaker might say. I asked her to describe the word "key," and she stated, "Old, rusty... I don't know... I think of it as simple. Americans have such complicated keys. But in France most of their keys just have like one little square at the bottom." Sarah's words were, in obvious words, simple. She also gave us the idea that she believed American keys to be much more complicated than the first idea of a French key to her. I agree with her, because the first idea for a key in my American mind is something intricate and puzzling. The contrast between the French idea and the American idea is larger than you may think.

My last question for Sarah was one further bringing out the differences between the English and the French speakers. In France, every noun is either masculine, or feminine. This is the same for many languages, like Spanish and German. Psychologytoday.com really went well in depth, but I wanted to see for myself how people who spoke this way thought differently.
I asked, "Do you often find yourself comparing feminine or masculine features to words due to the French making those words masculine or feminine? For example, do you see boats as a boy because they are masculine in French compared to Americans typically seeing them as feminine?"
Sarah responded, "I mean, I don't think of it as like my first response to a word. In French class, it just comes to my mind really easily. I don't have to think about it. I don't see boats as a boy, no." So maybe for Sarah, she just doesn't let the masculine and feminine pronouns get to her. To her they are like part of the noun, as if they could simply be written in the dictionary.

I can conclude this interview saying that, yes, the conventions of our language shape our perceptions of reality. Gaps and different pronunciations of words can really change the way a person thinks, and languages will always stand as barriers between different worlds.

Due May 8th