The weird way language affects our sense of time and space

The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.

If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?

These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.

In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.

The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.

It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour. "This is a principle of cognition that I don't think anyone would dispute," says Casasanto.

Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.

There are ways around this conundrum, however. Casasanto, for example, often teaches people in his lab to use metaphors from other languages (in their own tongue) and investigates what impact this has on their thinking. We know that people often use metaphors to think about abstract concepts – for example, a "high price", "long time" or "deep mystery". This way, you are not comparing people from different cultures, which may influence the results. Instead you are focusing on how thinking changes in the same people from the same culture while speaking in two different ways. Any cultural differences are therefore removed from the equation.

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Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left. 

Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.

This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.

Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."

Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age. 

We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation by training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to. They then react faster to statements that are consistent with time going the opposite way to what they are used to.

But things get even more interesting. In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.

In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.  

Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday "short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking – people conceptualise "lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view. Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening". 

And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but "big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".

The same is also true in Spanish.

"I can talk about 'long time' [in English], but if I use this expression in Greek, people will look at me funny," explains Athanasopoulos, who is a native Greek speaker. "They will think I'm using it in a poetic way or in a way to emphasise it." 

Athanasopoulos, who found Casasanto's results fascinating, set out to investigate this issue. He sat Swedish and Spanish speakers in front of a computer screen and asked them to estimate how much time had passed when either watching a line grow or a container fill up. The trick was that these events occurred at different rates. Monolingual Swedish speakers were easily misled when the line was shown – they believed a longer line meant more time had passed, even if that wasn't the case. Their time estimates weren't, however, influenced by a filling container. For Spanish speakers, it was the other way around. 

Athanasopoulos then went further, looking at bilingual Spanish and Swedish speakers – and what he found was remarkable. When the Swedish word for duration (tid) appeared in the top corner of the computer screen, the participants estimated time using line length and weren't affected by container volume. But when this changed to the Spanish word for duration (duración), the results completely reversed. The extent to which the bilinguals were affected by the time metaphors of their second language was related to how proficient they were in that language. 

These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking? Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two points of time cannot swap places – there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating around – and potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in creating it," he says.

Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously – as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been – and still is – holding back physics. (Read more about whether time goes in just one direction.)

"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto. 

Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on holiday next month".

But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.

He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.

This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen. 

It is also backed by a 2018 experiment in the bilingual city Meran/Merano, in northern Italy, where about half the inhabitants speak German, a futureless language, and the other half Italian, a futured language. The researchers tested 1,154 primary school children's ability to resist temptation by asking them whether they would like two tokens (which could be exchanged for presents) at the end of the experiment or a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens) in four weeks.

They discovered that German-speaking children were on average 16 percentage points more likely to be able to wait for a larger number of tokens than Italian-speaking children – in line with Chen's hypothesis. The results still held when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background and residential area.

But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world – influencing how we orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – to talk about even mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame – the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference objects.

But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation – such as "next to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when facing it? The former is called an "intrinsic" reference frame (having two reference points: computer and keys) and the latter a "relative" reference frame (there are three reference points: computer, keys and observer). 

And this can shape how we think – and navigate. Tenbrink's and her colleagues have compared the use of reference frames in English and Spanish. In one experiment, she asked people to decide whether an object, say a ball, was left or right of a central figure: an animal, human or object, based on two descriptions given in English or Spanish. For example: "I see a dog. The ball is on the left of the dog." Or: "I see a dog, the ball is on the dog's left."

In English, those two descriptions can denote two different sides of the dog, whereas in Spanish they both refer to what English speakers would think of as the "dog's left".

Spanish monolinguals located the ball using the intrinsic reference frame 78% of the time and English monolinguals 52% of the time. English speakers only chose the intrinsic frame if the possessive sentence, "the ball is on the dog's left", was used. The phrasing didn't matter to Spanish speakers. They simply preferred the intrinsic frame, unless the object was inanimate – it was a vase or a car rather than a dog, statue or human.

In a follow-up study, Tenbrink showed that bilingual Spanish and English speakers were somewhere in the middle between monolingual Spanish and English speakers, and were more influenced by the reference frame used most commonly in the country they lived in. "Spanish and English speakers interpret spatial relationships in a slightly different way," says Tenbrink. "And once the speaker speaks both languages, their preferences shift in different ways. I thought that was quite fascinating because people won't normally realise that their preferences shift because they have learned a second language." 

Either way, it's something to keep in mind if you're picking a meeting place with someone who speaks a different language to you.

Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a car". 

Athanasopoulos recalls an incident which laid bare how this can interfere with navigation. While working on a linguistic project, he went for a hike with a group of international researchers in the English countryside. Aiming to get from a town to a small village, they had to get through a private estate by walking across a field, as instructed by a sign with the message: "Walk across the field diagonally." To the English and Spanish speakers, this was intuitive. But a German speaker hesitated, looking slightly confused. When shown the path across the field, at the end of which there was a church, she finally concluded: "Ah, so you mean we should walk towards the church?" She needed a start and end point to picture the diagonal the sign was referring to. 

As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language is "better" than another. As Tenbrink argues, "a language will develop what its users need".

But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.

* Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren are science journalists and authors of Are You Thinking Clearly?

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