Language or Thought - What Comes First?

On the power of English & performing motherhood in multiple languages

Because I love a good chicken/egg reference, a pretty pic of an egg on a plate for you! By Ulvi Sasfari for Unsplash

Just before and right after the holidays, the language journalism gods blessed us (me!) with two articles on language. I was initially going to write about them separately but there is so much overlap in notions around how we think, how we communicate and how we mother in both of these articles, it made sense to write about them together.

The first article is by Manvir Singh and was published in The New Yorker just before Christmas with the online title “How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?” (In the print version of the magazine, the article is called “Talk Sense”.) Singh explores the relationship between language and thought but through the lens of English dominance. If English is becoming the world’s lingua franca, what does that mean for how we think? Singh writes:

“Yet many researchers find another reason to worry about the spread of English: the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages, they argue, influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality.”

I remember having a hard time writing about Whorfianism, or linguistic relativity, a.k.a. the idea that language influences thought, in Mother Tongue Tied. I kept putting it off in some sort of strange mind game (thought influencing writing!) until I finally had to do it. In some bizarre way, despite it being a simple proposal, the vastness of such a theory is hard to grasp and discuss. If language influences thought, so much more and yet, equally so much less would make sense. Could I confuse us all a little more?! In the New Yorker, Singh makes a case for not an all-in “language influences thought” but a form of “weak Whorfianism”: “What if language is less like a yoke than like a wind, nudging us in various directions?”

The article is a fascinating examination of something people love to discuss but with the added layer of English dominance. Influence layered upon influence as if, or perhaps because, our thoughts have to begin somewhere. But as Singh concludes, and what I also try to convey in MTT, “If ways of speaking can alter ways of thinking, ways of thinking can alter ways of speaking as well.”

Ha! Chicken & egg. There is no beginning and no end, suckers!

The other article by Olga Mecking, for the Guardian, is titled, “From ‘gestation’ to ‘gentle’: across Europe, why do we talk about parenting in English?” How I interpreted this article is two-fold: Mecking writes about typical vocabulary of motherhood she had to learn after having children, from words like “pacifier” and “stroller” to acronyms on most baby-related forums. But she also argues that most of the vocabulary is in English even in multilingual contexts, likely an influence of US and UK parenting ideas, she notes. Mecking is essentially asking the same question as Singh, except in a parenting context: “What does it mean if the English language has such power to influence the way mothers and fathers raise their children around the world?”