The First Language we Speak…. and Design

The first language we speak can influence how we experience spaces and the objects in them for the rest of our lives.

Our earliest language influences what we pay attention to (because we need to pick words for those situations) and what we expect as we live our lives. Language becomes a sort of lens through which we perceive our world. Some examples of how follow.

Talking colour: How our first language categorises colours is really important.  Regardless of the language we speak we’ll all actually see the same colours, but we’ll talk about them differently based on how we’ve learned to categorize them with the colour words we learn.  For example, some languages actually use the same colour to label things that are blue and things that are green.

If in our first language there are completely different words for light and dark blue (in other words, these shades are not distinguished just with an adjective), we’ll really quickly distinguish and label light and dark blues for the rest of our lives.

Some languages categorise nouns as masculine or as feminine.  If you speak French, or Spanish, or German, or many other languages, you know that some things are categorized as male and others as female.

If something is feminine in your first language (say the noun “chair” is feminine), you will feel best when the chairs you run into share stereotypical female traits, like they feature organic lines, are elegant, etc., or seem graceful or elegant.  The reverse will be true if you first spoke of chairs as masculine, then you’ll prefer them to be angular/rectilinear and sturdy.  This effect is found throughout your life, even when you’re an adult and speaking a language such as English with someone; English rarely “genderises” nouns, and exception is ships, for instance.  These gender-related differences are tied into basic structures in our brain and how languages work, not any sort of sexism on our part.

A final example:  different cultures prefer to maintain different personal spaces.  We’ll maintain the distances associated with the culture tied to the language we’re speaking.

Languages spoken have intriguing effects on all sorts of aspects of our lives, even how we experience design.