media update’s Talisa Jansen van Rensburg takes a look at how language affects the way you create content. 

Lera Boroditsky is an associate professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. In a 2018 TED Talk, she spoke about how language shapes the way we think. She also explained why each one of us has a different way of creating content. 

In her discussion, Boroditsky asks the following questions:
  • Why do we think the way we do?
  • How can we think differently?
  • What thoughts or content do we wish to create?
Being able to answer these questions will allow you to better understand the goals you need to set when creating your content.

“Roughly 6 500 languages are spoken in the world today,” says Anna Klappenbach, a contributor for Busuu. This shows that the human mind is capable of finding thousands of ways to communicate with one another using just sounds and vibrations, but this also means that each language allows the speakers of that language to think differently. 

Here’s how language influences your content:

1. Language impacts the way you describe things

The way people describe how something happened differs depending on the dialect they use. For example, in the English language, if someone broke a cup they would describe the event by saying “it was an accident”. But if a German-speaking person was to describe the exact same event, they would say “the cup broke” or “the cup broke itself” to describe what happened.

Boroditsky says that an English speaker is more likely to remember who broke the cup as opposed to a German speaker, who refers to the specific event itself — the cup was broken;  here, the event is focussed on the action itself as opposed to the person who caused the action. 

Many European languages, such as German and Italian, make use of grammatical gender, where nouns are either feminine or masculine. This also plays a big role in how people would describe various objects and make use of nouns. 

Boroditsky gave the following example in her TED talk: a German-speaking person refers to a bridge as being feminine whereas a Spanish-speaking person would refer to it as being masculine. 

So, if a German were to describe a bridge they would use typical stereotypical feminine words such as ‘beautiful’ or ‘elegant’. This is opposed to a Spanish-speaking person, who would use masculine words such as ‘strong’ or ‘big’.

Therefore, if you are writing for an English-speaking audience, you might want to take into consideration that they don’t normally make use of grammatical gender nouns, so when describing something, it’s best to steer clear from saying the bridge is beautiful or strong and rather just focus on the facts. 

The language that you speak also impacts sentence structures. For example, take a look at the following example in Zulu: ‘Inkomo edla yodwa’. This means you're “someone who seeks to do things by yourself”. However, when directly translated to English (and the English language structure on Google), it means “solitary cow”. This proves that sentence structure is important. I mean, no one can take translations from Google and directly put it into an article from a different language. That’s why you need to understand the way the dialect is spoken, and it needs to come directly from the source (and not the Internet). 

2. Language affects what you place your focus on

“People who speak different languages will pay attention to different things depending on what their languages have trained them to do,” says Boroditsky. For example, in English, if a person asks someone to look at different shades of blue, and then asks them what colour it is, the person being questioned is likely to just say that it’s blue.

However, in Russia, speakers distinguish colours by their hue. For example, if they see light blue they would refer to it as ‘goluboy’; and when they see dark blue, they would describe it as ‘siniy’. Why? Because that is what their languages have trained them to do. 

If your languages train you to pay specific attention to certain things such as colour, time or location it will impact the way in which you write. Learning more about other languages can allow you to place your focus on different aspects of content. 

If you want to create great content, you will need to be diverse with your thinking. Learning more about different languages will allow you to train your mind to look at events, nouns, time and location in a different light, which will allow you to attract a wider audience. 

How has your mother tongue impacted the way you create content? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Now that you know how language shapes your content, be sure to read How typography influences the way readers see your content. 
*Image courtesy of Pixabay