x
An Aboriginal language provides unexpected insight into how language influences perception
By Christine Kenneally on November 1, 2023
Aboriginal elders locate landmarks at Da Ayimeli. The culturally significant site is near Wadeye, a town close to Australia's northern coast. Credit: David Maurice Smith
In the early 20th century linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf thrilled his contemporaries by noting that the Hopi language, spoken by Native American people in what is now Arizona, had no words or grammatical elements to represent time. Whorf argued that this meant Hopi speakers had no concept of time and experienced what an English speaker might call “the passage of time” in a completely different way. This bold idea challenged the prevailing notion that there was a correct way to see the world—a way that lined up with the concepts already embedded in the languages of Western scholarship.
As it turns out, Hopi has quite a complex system for describing time, and those who speak it are perfectly capable of thinking about time in all kinds of ways, as indeed are all humans. In light of this realization, modern linguists assumed that even if the fundamental structures of language may differ—and even if languages specify things such as gender, number, direction and relative time in diverse ways—everyone must perceive the world in the same basic way.
Work on Australian Aboriginal languages has complicated that view, most recently in a groundbreaking study of Murrinhpatha. Spoken by most residents of Wadeye, a town of 2,500 people on Australia's northwestern coast, the language has many fascinating characteristics. Action, participants, ownership and intention may be expressed with a single word. This quality, which linguists describe as “polysynthetic,” means that many affixes may attach to a verb—and with each additional affix another layer of story accrues. The meaning conveyed by such a word contains actors and acting entwined into a complex whole. For example, the single word mengankumayerlurlngimekardi means “he was going through our bags stealing from us.
ADVERTISEMENT
Murrinhpatha also has free word order, which means subjects, verbs and objects can and do occur in any position in a sentence. In practice, this means the two-year-olds of Wadeye learn how to wield massively complex words that bear little relation to the content of a typical English-language book of ABCs.
Recently Rachel Nordlinger, a linguist at the University of Melbourne who has studied Murrinhpatha for 18 years, and her colleagues conducted the first psycholinguistic experiment in the language. Significantly, they found that when people are putting their thoughts into words, their mental processes may be shaped by the structure of their language.
From the late 1950s onward one of the most important observations in modern linguistics was that any child can learn any language. It followed that all children must have the same mental equipment for acquiring language. In 2009 psycholinguist Anne Cutler observed that, in part because of this truism, researchers assumed the systems for adult language processing were also the same and would yield similar results across studies no matter what language they used to test them. Language-processing experiments were written up, replicated and discussed with no consideration of the fact that the different languages used may have had some effect on the findings. It wasn't that language diversity was entirely invisible, Cutler noted, but that the research objective was to unearth a universal system that all humans used.
Over time that view became less tenable, in part because of Cutler's contributions. One of her findings was that listeners segment a speech stream based on the cadence of their first language. French speakers segment a speech stream into syllables, whereas English speakers segment it by stress placement.
Field linguists, whose work brings them regularly into contact with the stunning diversity of the world's languages, also have long doubted the idea that a person's native language has no impact on their thought processes. And more recently, many researchers have been troubled by the fact that most work on universal properties of language and language processing has been carried out using English and a few other familiar languages—a group that probably represents less than 5 percent of the world's language diversity. “The focus was on finding universals and explaining away the differences,” says psycholinguist Evan Kidd, one of Nordlinger's co-experimenters. “But the search for universals took place in only one corner of the language universe.”
