Do some languages make you more socially aware?

Imagine you visit two cities and your smartphone GPS is not working– one where every street corner has street names and signs to important institutions and one where the street signs are sporadic and there are hardly any signs for museums or parks. 

In the first city everything is well identified and you hardly need to remember any directions as you can just look at the signs and directions. 

In the second city you ask directions from someone and they tell you to look at buildings with certain colors and trees of certain size etc. to get around. In the second city you need to pay a lot of attention to the buildings and vegetation etc. to get around. You have to be very aware of the surroundings so you don’t get lost.

A similar situation happens with some languages. Some languages are spoken quite precisely so a listener needs to pay attention to just “in the moment” speech to understand what is being said. However, some languages are spoken in a manner that one needs to pay attention to the entire previous conversation to make sense of the conversation as the subject, object, tense, etc. may be missing in the way the language is spoken.

Language is the gateway to any culture. In addition to having the ability to convey our needs and desires accurately to others, a language also captures the social fabric and beliefs of a culture. Some languages are very precise in conveying intention very accurately not only in legally binding contracts but also in everyday conversation. If we examine a legal contract in, say, the English language, we find ourselves in such a jumble of words that most of us give up and just sign at the bottom line.

In most languages when we hear a sentence we are able to ascertain issues like: who is the subject, who or what is the object or objects, whether the action being talked about is happening now or did it happen in the past or will it happen in the future. Additionally we are able to understand if the speech involves a request or an order or an expectation or hope etc. Languages have prepositions that allow us to judge positions in space and time and adjectives and adverbs to figure out qualities and intensities. In some languages one is able to know if a man or woman is speaking and if the conversation is for respected and elderly or for friends and colleagues.

When we use a very precise language that leaves very little room for misjudgement and we don’t need to “track” the language very carefully since at each point there is little or no ambiguity. It is like you are wandering in a city and at every corner there are precise instructions so there is little chance of getting lost. 

There are however, many languages which are quite imprecise in that a sentence in a conversation leaves a lot of ambiguity that requires one to not only listen to what is being said at the moment but what has been said already, how the person speaking is gesturing and the how speaker’s facial expressions are changing as they speak. It is as if you are in a city with very sporadic street signs so that you need to be very attentive to all the buildings and trees to avoid getting lost. Japanese is an example of one such language.

There are some aspects of Japanese verb conjugation that are much simpler than what other languages have. For example, the verb form is not dependent on:

1) the subject (I, you, he, she, we, they);

2) gender of the subject;

3) number (singular or plural) of the subject.

Also the present and future tense verb forms are the same. On the other hand the verb form can convey degrees of respect, level of agreement with the speaker, desire to do something etc. In spoken Japanese even though subject pronouns exist they are usually not used and unless one is following the conversation closely one may get confused about the subject. This of course requires one to pay attention closely to what has been said earlier.

In Japanese there are a lot of subtle and not so subtle gestures (nodding, bowing, eye movements, etc.) as well as affirmations or subtle sounds to convey disagreements. These small clues allow the speaker to make adjustments to what they are saying to avoid awkward situations. 

In a language like Japanese one has to have a greater degree of awareness to know what the implications of the spoken language are and one’s attention cannot “drift off”. There are many other languages that have rules similar to Japanese that keep the participants in a conversation attentive and aware of more than “what is being said” at the moment.

Author: Dr. Jasprit Singh, President Gurmentor, Inc.

A Learning Company https://gurmentor.com

Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engg. & Comp. Sci. and Applied Physics

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor