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Big Think

Obese? Smoker? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It's Because of the Language  
You Speak
David Berreby on February 5, 2012,

Why can't the Greeks be more like the Germans? Could it be because they
speak  Greek? There's no doubt some nations save more money than others, and
plan  better for retirement, and watch their collective weight, but the
proposed  explanations for different levels of future-mindedness have been
historical,  sociological, cultural and psychological—not grammatical. In _this  
ingenious paper_
(http://faculty.som.yale.edu/keithchen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf)  (pdf), though, M. Keith Chen argues that syntax plays a  role.
His analysis suggests that if your language's syntax blurs the difference  
between today and tomorrow (as do, say, Chinese and German) then you are more  
likely to save money, quit smoking, exercise and otherwise prepare for
times to  come. On the other hand, if you have three dollars in your IRA and a
big  credit-card balance, it's a safer bet you speak English or Hausa or
Greek or  some other language that forces speakers to distinguish present from
future.
The point is not that some peoples are futureless—all human beings  
understand the difference between today and next year just fine, no matter what  
tongue they speak. But languages, as the linguist Roman Jakobson observed,  
differ in what they require speakers to think about. As The  Economist's
language columnist _recently  pointed out_
(http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/12/differences-among-lang...) , in English when I tell you I went
to the store, I am free to  decide whether I want to tell you that I walked,
and that I also came back home,  and that I am a man. In Russian, those
other details are not optional. If you  want to form the verb correctly, as a
matter of syntax, you have to get into the  details that English would leave
to context, body language, or extra explanatory  phrases. : "So 'I went'
would, in one Russian word (khodila, say),  express "I [a female] went [by foot]
[and I came back]." If you don't want to  express all of that, tough luck."
Being clear about the timing of your topic turns out to be one of the areas
 where grammars differ. Some tongues, including English, are strong  
future-time-reference, or FTR, languages: If Chen, a professor at Yale's School  
of Management, wants to say he can't meet you tomorrow because he has a
seminar,  he has to say "I am going to listen to a seminar." On the other hand,  
others are weak FTR languages. In Mandarin, Chen would say Wˇo qù t ̄ıng  ji
ˇangzuo ("I go listen seminar," where "go" just means that he's heading
over,  nothing to do with when).
Chen theorized that weak-FTR languages would be more conducive to  
future-oriented behavior because, in those grammars, the future feels the same  as
the present. Linguists have mapped strong and weak FTR languages in Europe,  
so Chen correlated that information with data on behaviors that sacrifice  
present pleasures for the future self, like saving, exercising and avoiding  
tobacco (culled from the _World  Values Survey_
(http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/) , the _Survey of  Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe_
(http://share-dev.mpisoc.mpg.de/) , and the _OECD_
(http://www.oecd.org/pages/0,3417,en_36734052_36734103_1_1_1_1_1,00.html) 's  trove of reports on economic
behavior since 1970).
His results are rather mind-boggling: In Europe, speakers of weak-FTR  
languages (German, Finnish and Estonian are examples) were 30 percent more  
likely to have saved money in a given year than were equivalent speakers of a  
strong-FTR language (English, Spanish or Greek, for instance). (To put that
in  perspective, according to Chen's analysis, speaking a strong-FTR language
is as  a big a risk-factor for not-saving as unemployment.) Weak-FTR
language-speakers  have piled up an average of 170,000 more euros per person for
their retirement  than  strong-FTR speakers, and are 24 percent less likely
to have smoked  heavily, 29 percent more likely to exercise regularly, and 13
percent less  likely to be obese. The weak-FTR speakers even had stronger
grips and great lung  capacity than did those whose grammar forced them to
mark the difference between  today and tomorrow. National records reflect
individual habits too, Chen writes:  "Countries with weak-FTR languages save on
average six percent more of their GDP  per year than their strong-FTR
counterparts."

This argument will likely give linguists and other social scientists  
conniptions (for one thing, Chen's obesity and overall-health statistics suggest  
that certain languages are inherently healthier to speak than others).
How might they fend him off? One avenue of resistance to Chen's idea is,  
obviously, to suggest that language differences are simply a reflection of  
cultural or political tendencies, and that those are the real drivers  of
national differences. But Chen says he controlled for other possible factors  
by a statistical analysis that compared perfectly equivalent people. In other
 words, he compared weak-FTR speakers to strong-FTR speakers of the same  
religion, nation, gender, income and education level: If one of those  traits
explained differences in savings rates or health behaviors, then people  
with that trait should have come out the same, regardless of their language.  
Instead, the weak-versus-strong FTR distinction held for every group.
Interestingly, speaking a weak-FTR language didn't make people more likely
to  say they thought the future was important.  Plenty of strong-FTR  
speakers say they too cherish values like saving for a rainy day. Apparently,  
though, people who speak weak-FTR languages are more likely to actually  do
something about this principle. If language simply tracked cultural  values,
Chen argues, then people who valued saving money should show the same  
behavior regardless of their syntax. Instead, weak-FTR speakers who value thrift  
save more than strong-FTR speakers who valued thrift. That suggests that mere
 grammar, outside of people's awareness, is influencing their behavior—
regardless  of what they use that grammar to say about themselves.
Mind research has its trends, like any other endeavor. When I was in
college,  the pendulum had swung strongly toward a preference for big, universal  
perspectives: The hottest and hippest thinkers were out to elucidate
Language,  not any particular language, and the Mind, not any particular
neighborhood's  minds. Studies of behavior below the level of the entire human race
were just  stamp-collecting. It has been some time since the pendulum swung
back, and in  2012 it's _entirely  respectable_
(http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Thought-Asians-Westerners-Differently...)  again (as it was in
1912) to say that minds are molded by the  particular times and places
where they live. But the notion that people's  grammar could be having an effect
on lifelong behavior that is outside their  awareness (and independent of
their conscious thoughts about their values) is an  amazing leap.