how does language shape the way we think?

Have you ever thought about...your thoughts? 

do you think in english? spanish? korean? polish? italian? french? 

and if you know more than one, or two languages, do you some how control the different languages in your head so you think in that language? I am korean, and it is true, and i do find it odd that when i think, i often talk to myself in my head and it can be english, or korean, or spanish even. but does the exposure of different languages only alter the way we think in our heads (talking to ourselves) or is there more to it?

The impact of language to our brains is phenomenal. Languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors and objects. Studies have found the effects of language on how people's interpretations, reasoning, understanding, and how people perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks and even in the way they make decisions. What would your life be life if language didn't exist? How would we socialize and make friends or get a job? Language is communication from not only one person to another to also to ourselves. So, is language a tool for communication, or does it shape our thoughts as well?

For instance, people who speak english would describe directions with the words right, left, up and down, where as people in Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia, describes direction and space by the words north, south, east and west-meaning that these people always have to be direction oriented. Not only does language changes the perception of direction and space, but the perception of time is also altered. English speakers tend to talk about time with horizontal spatial metaphors; "the best is ahead of us" "the worst is behind us". Mandarin speakers talk about time with vertical spatial metaphors; "next month is down month" "last month is the up month"). English speakers talk about duration in terms of length; "that was a short talk" "the meeting didn't take long". Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount; using words such as "much""big" and "little", rather than "short" and "long". Research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language.

The last example that language shapes the way we think is the use of grammatical gender. In spanish and other Romantic languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. In a study, German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender assignments between the two different languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." "In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman." (taken from the article.)

The fact the use of different languages alters the way we perceive the world, and the objects we look at and changes the perception of space is amazing. The way i am thinking about where i am sitting right now, typing this response would be different to an australian or someone from spain. From the perception of space, time and even nouns, languages changes the way we think. These studies show that linguistic processes effect even down to the most fundamental thought processes which unconsciously shapes our brain altering perception. Language is important to how we all deal with experience with each other and how we view the world. 

Get the reading here.