Episode 106: Language and Thought around the World, Part 1

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EPISODE 106: Language and Thought around the World, Part 1, with Asifa Majid

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On This Episode

We think of language as a way to express what we think, but language can actually shape how we think. An estimated 7,000 distinct languages are spoken around the world, and many of them are unstudied or undescribed. It is estimated that there are already over 500 extinct languages. The loss of a language is no less worrisome than the loss of a species. In the first of two episodes, our hosts talk to the cognitive psychologist Asifa Majid about linguistic diversity and why we must preserve it.

This episode was recorded on June 2, 2023.
Released on November 8, 2023.

The conversation continues in Episode 107.

Guest

Asifa Majid is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford who studies the relationship among language, culture, and mind. At Radcliffe, she worked on a book that will synthesize her wide-ranging empirical work to elucidate which aspects of cognition are fundamentally shared and which are language- or culture-specific.

Credits

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Transcript

[MUSIC]

Ivelisse Estrada:
Welcome back to BornCurious. I’m Ivelisse Estrada.

Heather Min:
I’m Heather Min.

Ivelisse Estrada:
In this episode, we have the chance to speak with Asifa Majid, who is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford, where she studies the relationship among language, culture, and the mind.

Heather Min:
As the 2022–2023 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow, Asifa is writing a book to shed light on the aspects of cognition that are inherently universal and those that are influenced by language or culture. Welcome, Asifa.

Asifa Majid:
Thank you. Excited to be here to talk to you guys.

Ivelisse Estrada:
I’m going to start with a real basic question. What first got you interested in language?

Asifa Majid:
Yeah, I grew up bilingually. My parents spoke Punjabi at home, and their friends spoke English. My earliest memories are going from one of my mum’s friends, who’d said something in English, and coming to my mom and touching her face and telling her in Punjabi what had just happened.

So I knew different people had access to different languages. And as I got older, talking to friends in English, there were some things that just seemed impossible to get across. There were concepts that you could maybe find a translation for, but it didn’t quite capture the original meaning.

And so yeah, those initial thoughts were there, but I didn’t know you could study this. It wasn’t something—we didn’t learn anything about different languages at school. When I went to University in Glasgow, we had a psychology of language, we had the philosophy of language, and it was all in English. If I asked questions about other languages at that time, there wasn’t much interest. There was kind of a vaguely dismissive attitude. Language was universal, and whatever you find in English would appear in other languages.

And it wasn’t until I’d finished my PhD that I discovered that there was a research institute in the Netherlands that was dedicated to the study of different languages. And when I found that out, I knew I had to go there.

Heather Min:
What do they do? Do they do comparative studies? How is it different from what you were exposed to in university?

Asifa Majid:
Well, sadly, the group that I went to work with doesn’t exist anymore. So, I went to work at a Max Planck Institute, and they had a director, Steve Levinson, whose whole department was focused on documenting endangered languages at the time. It was a really special place.

There were lots of linguists who were doing documentation work. So, going to lesser-described languages all over the world, coming back with data, with the goal of writing grammars, creating multimedia texts, and giving back to communities. There was, kind of, on the one hand, just basic documentation work with a view of preserving this aspect of human culture. And then I was there taking part in large comparative studies.

So, when you’re documenting each individual language, they’re each unique and beautiful in their own right. But at the same time, we want to capture whether there are any universals or whether something is unusual from a comparative perspective. Part of my goal was trying to figure out ways to collect comparative data where you weren’t just applying things from English and seeing where other languages fail, but rather kind of trying to capture what was unique about each language in its own right.

Heather Min:
Can you explain what you mean by document? Because listening to you, it sounds like there’s some anthropology involved. You think languages. You think linguists. So, what do you mean by document?

Asifa Majid:
Language is structured. When linguists are trying to document a language, they want to describe the sound system of the language. So, what are all of the unique sounds that you use in order to build words?

Then you want to build a lexicon of the words. But of course then, each word isn’t completely unique. If you think about something like give and gave, so both of those are related. There’s a sound change in the middle of the word.

It’s irregular, but they still capture the same meaning. You want to capture these sorts of regularities, like walk, walks, where you can add S onto a bunch of verbs, but also these irregular aspects of the lexicon. And that kind of brings us onto the grammar. You want to figure out, how do you combine words in such a way that it makes sense to your addressee? It doesn’t finish there. We also have ways of structuring sentences to create stories or discourses, longer texts.

And in conversation, there’s rules about how we should talk. What are the interactional routines when we give things? In English, I can ask you for something: “Can I please have…,” you know, and you give it to me. And I say, “thank you.” There’s a "please" and a "thank you." But other languages might have a more expanded routine there. When I was in the Netherlands, there’s a three-part routine, rather than a two-part routine. It’s not just "please" and "thank you," but there’s a kind of "you’re welcome." And if you don’t say that last part, you’re being rude. So, we have to learn all of these aspects, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to capture.

On the one hand, we have these ideas that there are certain kinds of things that should appear in all languages. On the other hand, you’d hope that we’re making those generalizations on the basis of real data. If you think about what are the sound systems I talked about, it’s one way of talking about the fact that there’s structures that you can build words from. If you speak a sign language, for example, not a spoken language, then it’s not going to be sounds that are the ground bases from which you’re making words. So, when you’re documenting a language, you’re trying to capture these regular patterns, the sounds, the words, the grammar, discourse, all of these aspects of what it takes to be a fully functioning speaker or listener in this community.

Ivelisse Estrada:
And this seems like quite the monumental task. I mean, as background for our listeners, how many languages are currently spoken around the world?

Asifa Majid:
If you look in the literature, you’ll find different estimates. It can be somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000. And that’s because we don’t have a complete record of all of the languages in the world. So, we’re kind of guesstimating in parts. A language like English, which has almost more than a billion speakers, if you include all the second language speakers, as well—that’s unusual. Most languages are only spoken by a few hundred or thousands, tens of thousands of people.

And if you go from village to village, there’ll be differences. But some of those differences might be small, so there are dialectal differences, if you like. For example, I’m speaking a slightly different English than you guys are or an American English speaker would speak. So, some of them are dialectal. We’d still say it’s the same language. But others are more substantive.

Linguists use a criteria of mutual intelligibility. So, if I say something, even if my sounds are a bit different to the ones that you might use, if you can still understand me, then we’ll say this is one language that we’re speaking. The further apart two speakers get in being able to understand one another, the more likely we are to say that there’s two languages.

But that kind of breaks down. If you think about something like Norwegian and Danish and Swedish, we know that there’s a kind of a climb. There’s some understanding between speakers of these varieties. But we still see that they’re separate languages.

So that’s the kind of fuzzy part of figuring out where is the language, where is a dialect. But using the best criteria that we have, we think there’s around 7,000 languages today.

Ivelisse Estrada:
And one thing that, from hearing you speak before, really struck me is when you said that one language goes extinct every three months and that rate is accelerating, and that 40 percent of existing languages are completely undescribed. That blew my mind.

Asifa Majid:
Yeah, it’s a sad state of affairs, really. I think there’s both a kind of human cost and a scientific cost. If we’re thinking about the science, we know that each language seems to capture unique information.

A really nice study from a year or so ago showed documented Indigenous languages in major areas of the world and specifically looked at the biological knowledge encoded in each of these languages—so what animal and tree and plant species were encoded in each of those languages. And what they found was that each language has unique information about the biological world.

And when we start thinking about climate change and sustainability, that becomes pretty compelling as another reason that these small-scale or Indigenous languages are important to us. You have communities that have been living in the same place where people have in-depth knowledge about the landscape around them and the ecosystems around them, and also medicinal knowledge about how to use plants, for example, so many Indigenous cures.

And yet, with the loss of each language or a shift away from lifestyles to a more kind of globalized English, or maybe even urban environment, that information goes. So, you lose that generational transmission, and that’s knowledge lost forever. These languages aren’t written. It’s not like we can recover that information.

There’s a kind of compelling, I believe, scientific reason that we should be working with communities to figure out if communities want to stay in that place and keep their language alive. How can we help do that? On the other hand, there’s just the real human reason. You see that people who have been forcibly shifted away from their language—so we know that sadly, in the US and places like Australia, where Indigenous communities were shifted off their land and young children were taken forcibly from their families so that they could learn the mainstream language—that generational trauma is still very present for people. And there is a real sadness and grief at that loss of their ancestral language and culture and people striving to connect with that again. We should respect and preserve people’s right to live how they want.

Heather Min:
In talking about language extinction, you are clearly sharing that cultural anthropology and ethnography plays a role in thinking about languages. You look at cultures and the context in which language is a part of unique, distinct cultures, and therefore, we mourn when those die out.

Ivelisse Estrada:
So, assuming that diversity of language is this incredible thing that we’re looking for, what are some of the hot spots in the world? It’s been said that 800 languages are spoken in New York City. What are the hot spots?

Asifa Majid:
So globally, the most different languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea.

Ivelisse Estrada:
How many?

Asifa Majid:
Don’t ask me that.

All:
[LAUGHTER]

Heather Min:
But why?

Asifa Majid:
Why not?

All:
[LAUGHTER]

Heather Min:
Do they just—are they very clannish and not mingling with their neighbors?

Asifa Majid:
People have suggested geographical explanations for this kind of linguistic diversity. There’s mountainous areas or it’s an island. There are many different islands and so forth.

But I think you also have to think about the social conditions that allow for different languages to stay, and one of them is multilingualism. People there—many communities will speak each other’s languages. It needn’t be monolingual. If you think about 19th-century, 18th-century science or writings, people were writing in German, Latin, English, and reading each other’s writings. But that’s something that we seem to have lost. We’ve kind of focused in on just one language for every context.

Again, it goes back to this issue of keeping multilingualism alive. And I’m sure the New Yorkers, however many languages there are, they’re doing, likely, their day-to-day business in the major language of the city.

Heather Min:
In America anyway, we’ve sort of claimed the world’s cuisines as our own.

Asifa Majid:
Yeah, and when we do the same with words. English has just sucked up—along with colonial wealth—all of the words to go with it. “Kangaroo” or—

Ivelisse Estrada:
I’ve got a few from the Taino language—"hurricane.”

Asifa Majid:
Very good.

Ivelisse Estrada:
“Hammock.”

Asifa Majid:
Yeah.

Heather Min:
“Avocado” is an Indigenous Mexican word. Also, I learned the other day, “galore” is from Irish.

Asifa Majid:
Amazing. So, we do borrow, take, grasp. Some estimates say the English language has over a million words, but an average English speaker has a personal vocabulary of 40,000. So, most words in the English language, you don’t know. They are for a particular time, in a particular place, spoken by a specific community. They’re not things that are part of everyday vocabulary. That’s why you have to separate out what does an individual know, and what’s there in the language as a whole. And those don’t necessarily map one-to-one, especially for languages like English that have a history of writing, where we can see all of the vocabulary that’s ever been used, including things that have disappeared from use right now.

Heather Min:
So, researchers need to catch up with the richer reality of lived experience, as it were. Just to get us toward how a thought comes into play in language, what do you study? What do you do your research on? And how do you introduce or think about thought along with language?

Asifa Majid:
It’s both a vehicle for capturing cultural knowledge, and at the same time, it’s the tool with which we think. So, what exactly is the relationship between language and thinking?

Heather Min:
Can we think without language?

Asifa Majid:
Well, exactly. Begin with the idea that languages are packaging things in different ways, and they are capturing unique knowledge specific to place and cultural background and so forth. And it feels like it must be the main vehicle by which we think. But that would lead us to a bit of a strange conclusion.

If we think it’s the only or primary vehicle by which we think, it would make us believe that if you’re a young child who hasn’t learned language yet, you don’t have any thought, or if you’re an adult and you have a stroke and, sadly, lose your ability to talk because you’ve now got aphasia, you no longer can think. Those things don’t seem quite right.

And also, we are one species, but we know that we’re connected to the rest of the nonhuman animal species. And we really want to see that a dog can’t think, an elephant can’t think? That doesn’t seem quite right.

So psychologists have been trying to parcel out those aspects of our thinking that don’t necessarily require language and those aspects that do. And then, it’s trying to figure out, well, how do those connect? Do I first formulate a thought outside of language, and then I have to somehow get it into language?

Or is language involved in how I’m formulating thought? Is it the case that my thoughts are completely independent? When does language start influencing thinking? These are all the kinds of questions that cognitive scientists try to answer.

Heather Min:
The way that you talk about it, where you delve into theory and philosophy, it makes me think, have psychologists or modern social scientists not been studying this long?

Asifa Majid:
I think people have been asking the question about the relationship between language and thought but focus primarily on English. So, you can ask the same questions for a young infant. At what point do they have, let’s say, concepts of color?

We know that young infants’ color vision isn’t completely on board when they’re born, so they are developing their color vision. But as adults, we have categories of blue and green and red and pink, even though color’s continuous. We add in boundaries on this continuous spectrum.

And people have thought that might be due to language. And if that’s true, then if we look at children, they shouldn’t show evidence of categories until they learn the color words in their language. That kind of raises the question, can we look at babies’ color vision and see if there’s evidence for categories in there?

These are the kinds of questions that we can ask. And they are still relevant and there, even if you’re looking at one language. The thing that the cross-linguistic or cross-cultural dimension opens up is that, I think, it opens up more possibilities for untangling some of the things that are difficult to untangle in one space.

For example, if I’m looking at the development of color in children, and I’m doing these experiments in English, the children might not have the words yet when we’re testing them. Let’s say we can establish that separately. But they’re in a colored environment. So, we develop artifacts, toys, that maximally get children’s attention. And those seem to be very well capturing our categories. If you get a Fisher-Price toy that’s got blue and green and red and yellow, these very saturated colors, what the kids are getting as input is the parents playing with them and telling them, put the red square in the circle—put the blue—let’s put—so you’re getting these socialization routines, where you’ve got a crafted visual environment going along with the language that’s building these categories. But if we open up the window for cross-cultural studies, we can look at people in different visual environments who have different visual diets.

Heather Min:
Somebody who lives in the desert versus somebody who lives in the forest, or somebody who lives up in the Arctic.

Asifa Majid:
Exactly. And that way, we can try and tease apart some of the cultural and linguistic factors that go along into developing these categories. And if you get just the right communities, you might even be able to tease apart the language versus visual environment factors. So that’s why opening up the window to these 7,000 different languages and very different environments, very different cultures, it’s like a natural laboratory, where you can try and tease apart some of the things that are almost impossible to do within a single cultural context. It’s a scientific opportunity.

Heather Min:
So, you work at the hotbed of nature versus nurture here. What do you do? What’s your field of study?

Asifa Majid:
All of what we’ve been talking about.

All:
[LAUGHTER]

Heather Min:
What have you been working on this past year here at Radcliffe?

Asifa Majid:
I’ve been trying to synthesize some of the studies that we’ve been doing over the last years. As we talked about, language is complicated and has many different aspects to it. And over the last 20 years of my work, I’ve been working on capturing some of these different semantic domains.

I’ve worked on color, on events like walking and running or cutting and breaking, even ways to talk about the body. So we think, for example, the distinction between hand and arm is really obvious. But 1/3 of the world’s languages only have a single term to refer to the whole thing.

Heather Min:
Which are those languages?

Asifa Majid:
So Russian is one. Indonesian is another. And so that’s kind of interesting. You think, well, OK, if I don’t make a lexical distinction between hand and arm, what are the implications of that?

And there’s some suggestive evidence that might matter for how we think about doing certain kinds of actions. In the same way that we might not make a distinction between hand and arm, some languages don’t make a distinction between foot and leg. And when you ask people, OK, when you kick, what do you kick with?

If you ask an English speaker, they say, well, I kick with my foot. But of course, it’s silly, because when you kick, your whole leg is moving. You’re not just in contact with the foot. But yet, people focus on that, where if you ask a speaker of a language that has a single term, they’re more likely to say you kick with the whole thing.

Or if you get them to color in—it’s not just that they’re saying foot and leg. If you get them to color and color in that part of the body that you use to kick, you find these differences. So, I’ve been working on unpacking what the logic of these different semantic domains are. What’s the range of variation? Are there recurrent patterns that we see? Where is a language or culture exceptional in what they’re doing?

Ivelisse Estrada:
I’m wondering how you get your ideas for these questions. Does one investigation kind of give way to the next one? And then, how do you develop—how do you design the tests?

Asifa Majid:
I started working on events. And we were finding some recurrent patterns, but much more variation than the main community that I’m really a part of—the cognitive science community—recognized. You have these different communities of researchers, the people that are working on cross-linguistic documentation, know, suspect, or believe that every language is unique.

And then, you have another community that is more focused on finding universals in language and thought. They don’t often—in the past at least—didn’t speak very well to one another, because they used different methods. So descriptive, more qualitative, versus quantitative, more experimental. Part of my work has been trying to bridge those communities and do translation, kind of trying to get them to engage with one another.

When I started, it was kind of quite high-level things. And it kind of begged the question. When you find variation in one place, people say, ah, but you know, bodies, they must be universal. Because everybody has it, and there are some things that we need to talk about.

That led to that question. And it’s kind of, over the years, led to me looking at the basic building blocks of perception. So that was the colors and sounds and smells. Are there universals there?

Some of these things come organically from having being in dialogue with other scientists. Some of it’s natural curiosity. But I think that’s why the synthesis felt important to figure out what’s the most interesting thing to do next. You know, what would make the most impact?

Ivelisse Estrada:
And how do you not get overwhelmed just by the sheer amount of how much there is to learn?

All:
[LAUGHS]

Asifa Majid:
Great question. It’s exciting. You get to pick and choose what you want to do. There’s a freedom, you know. If it means diving into some philosophy or learning about chemistry or—I think that doesn’t feel overwhelming to me.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Well, Asifa, thank you so much for your time so far.

Asifa Majid:
Thank you. Thank you both.

Ivelisse Estrada:
We have exciting news to share. Due to the depth and richness of our conversation, we’ve decided to split this episode into two parts.

Heather Min:
So please stay tuned for part two, where we’ll delve even deeper into language and cognition with our guest, Asifa Majid.

The BornCurious podcast is brought to you by Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Thanks for joining us. You can find BornCurious wherever you listen to podcasts. And to learn more about Harvard Radcliffe Institute—

Heather Min:
Visit radcliffe.harvard.edu.

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