How Language Changes your Worldview

I don’t mention it on here much, but I’m in the process of writing fantasy books. As part of that process, I obviously have to design a setting and world for the stories to take place in. Since I’m a big language nerd, creating constructed languages (or conlangs) is an important part of that process to me.

Making these languages can add more depth to the worldbuilding than you’d probably expect. Every language has a unique worldview that can shape how you see even the most seemingly fundamental parts of the world.

With every language I learn and every language I construct, I see this more and more. There are some very basic parts of language that are more important than they might seem, and can change in ways you don’t expect.

So here’s a few examples, and the unseen impact they might have on worldview.

Color

This is one of those that at first seems unchangeable and rigid, but starts to become more malleable the more you think about it.

Color is actually really abstract in how it can be interpreted.

For example, in The Iliad and The Odyssey, the ocean and sky are never described as blue. It’s usually rosy-colored, or some other non-blue descriptor. That’s because the Ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for blue. They didn’t even really perceive it as a color. Blue is such a rare color combination in nature that it ends up being one of the last color words to show up in any language.

This means that when they described the sky, they saw it as so many other colors, but not blue.

Irish Gaelic has a different word for artificial greens vs. natural ones.

Russian differentiates between light blue and dark blue as different colors, much like we have pink and red.

If something as seemingly fundamental as color can change, altering our entire perception of the world with it, then what else can change?

Numbers

Numbers cannot fundamentally change based on our own perception of them. Just like color, the actual truth of their appearance and existence is concrete. 1+1 always equals 2. Two books will always be two books.

It’s our perception of these numbers that can change. And the biggest catalyst of that is the counting system a language uses. It’s the language that changes, not the numbers themselves.

English and many other European languages are base-10, meaning they reset their count at ten. After ten, we basically count “ten and one”, “ten and two”, etc.

But this is not always a fundamental truth of language. It’s common for languages to use multiples of five, since we have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Some languages have a base-5 counting system, resetting their count at every interval of five. Others, like Mayan languages, use base-20.

There are some unexpected ones out there, though, like base-27. And even these strange intervals of counting have special ways of counting using body parts.

Some languages don’t even have full counting systems. They might differentiate between ‘one’ and ‘two’ but then just have ‘some’ and ‘many’ for everything beyond that. The specific amounts aren’t as important.

Base-12 is interesting to me, too. I’m using it for one of my conlangs, and it’s made me think about so many things that using such a number would change. Here’s a few examples:

Age

For us, someone’s tenth birthday is a big milestone. They’ve reached double digits, and since 10 is a counting interval for us, it tends to be a big deal. We think of things in terms of decades. Our twenties, our thirties, etc. But in a culture that uses a base-12 system, they would think in terms of dozens, for lack of a better term.

If you think about it, twelve makes more sense as a milestone anyway. It’s right around the age when you transfer into adolescence and start puberty.

Dozens

The existence of the term “dozen” comes from the base-12-esque system that we use when counting baked goods and eggs. We use this specific word to refer to a group of twelve even though it only comes up in a few circumstances.

Counting

You’re probably thinking: “How do you count on your fingers using a base-12 system?”

Well, there are actually two ways to count with a base-12 system, and one of them lets you get to 144 without running out of space on your fingers!

The first option is to count like we do, but use each full hand as an additional count to make twelve. The other option is way cooler:

If you look at your four main fingers (not your thumb), you’ll notice that there are three segments on each finger. Use your thumb on one hand to count each of those segments, and you’ll get to twelve. Then, when you reach twelve, place your thumb on the first segment of your other hand. Then resume counting from one on your first hand. For each count of twelve, you move the finger on your second hand up another segment. By the time you reach the end of your second hand, you’ve counted to 144!

There are so many other interesting counting methods out there that can take advantage of eyes, shoulders, elbows, toes, and more. It would take way too long to get into all of them, but I hope this was a good peek into how we might be able to count with other numbers!

Noun Classifications

As English speakers, this is definitely one we don’t think about.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term “noun gender” before. Spanish has feminine and masculine nouns, and many languages have animate and inanimate nouns.

These classifications can sometimes have a noticeable effect on worldview. The moon in Spanish is La Luna. While this doesn’t necessarily reflect a belief that the moon is a woman, it can lead to associations with femininity.

I want to stress, though, that this is not always the case. Noun gender doesn’t often bear any meaning beyond the grammatical classification of a word. But those gender associations can sometimes crop up anyway.

A better example would be the animate/ inanimate classifications. Some languages have extremely complex means of classifying words that go beyond even these two.

But these categories often differentiate between things perceived as living and nonliving. Something as simple as the wind, if classified as animate, will support a worldview that wind is living or active in some way. Maybe it just means that it’s constantly changing in response to its environment, or maybe it’s viewed more symbolically as the earth breathing.

These classifications can mean so many different things, and might not reflect the culture the way you would expect.

Directions

We use directions all the time in everyday life.

For example, “Turn left onto 4th street in 300 feet” is something we’re used to hearing all the time. But imagine for a second if your navigation instead said “Turn northwest onto 4th street in 300 feet.”

The Pormpuraaw language in western Australia operates exactly like this. They don’t use any direction words that function relative to themselves (i.e. left and right). Everything is relative to the earth itself. You would tell someone that there’s something in their eastward eye rather than their right eye.

But learning to speak such a language means you’re always aware of your surroundings and your current direction.

As another example, many directions and movement words in Irish Gaelic are dependent on the initial location of the moving object. They have different words depending on if an object is coming up from below, down from above, moving down with motion, or currently below, to name a few examples.

Weirdly enough, this also has an effect on our perception of time. Lingodigest has a great article on this if you’re curious to hear more!

Conclusion

Language is so much more powerful and important than I could have ever realized before I studied it.

Get out there and learn a language. It might even make you better at speaking your native language!