Language Issues

When we speak a language we need to choose words from those available—sure every so often in a Dr. Seuss inspired moment of creativity, for example, we can invent a word or a phrase, but too much of that, unless you do it as well as Dr. Seuss himself, can land you in a padded and very quiet room.

The words that are available to you structure your thoughts, by giving you opportunities to draw distinctions by choosing one word or another and forming opinions, for example.

Languages regularly differ in how they name colors, not just the words they use to do so, but what hues they decide to label with the same, well, label, such as “blue” or “green.” Some languages have very different words for particular colors. For example, that are distinguished one from another in English only by adjectives. For example, in Russian, the words for dark blue and light blue are completely different; in English we distinguish these shades by adding “light” or “dark” to “blue.” People who speak Russian will more quickly distinguish items that are light blue from those that are dark blue than people speaking English. From their earliest days Russians have to put more effort into categorizing dark and light blue, they need to pick one of two completely different words to do so, so they pay more attention to this difference and respond quickly when it’s present.

Some languages link genders to particular nouns—if you speak French or German or Spanish you know exactly what I’m talking about (like “la” or “le”, “un” or “une”, “ein” or “eine”, etc). In English there aren’t too many nouns linked to gender; the best known instance of a gendered noun in English would be “ships” or “boats” which are usually referred to as feminine in English conversations.

Anyway, if you grow up speaking a language where something is categorized as feminine, even when you’re later speaking a language such as English where the same noun has no gender, you think prototypical versions of whatever that noun is share the attributes that are stereotypically linked to women and if you grow up speaking a language in which the exact same noun is categorized as masculine you associate it with stereotypical masculine qualities.

So, if you first speak a language in which the word “bridge” is feminine you think of bridges as being/ and needing to be graceful, with lots of curving lines, and if your first spoke a language for which “bridge” is masculine, you link bridges with strength, sturdiness and rectillinearity. Also, you’ll tend to think of the best versions of that bridge as curvy, etc., or angular, etc., based on that first language.

When this all gets particularly interesting is when people who originally speak languages where the same thing (say that bridge we’ve been talking about) is masculine in one language and feminine in the other find themselves in the same conversation. If both are part of the same design review committee, etc., there’s likely to be lots of heated debate in this case about which design to pick, the one that seems more stereotypically feminine or masculine.

If you’re having trouble talking with someone about design, it may be because you grew up speaking different languages.