I enrolled my 9yo in his second year of Hebrew and his first year of comprehensive Spanish. Both programs put a strong emphasis on teaching conversational skills and not merely teaching the students the grammatical technicalities of each language. I am super excited about this learning experience for my son. ::Insert happy dance:: You may think I'm fanatically; maybe even a tad bit obsessive about raising my children to be multilingual. Perhaps, my curiosity about languages is due to my own fascination with linguistics and anthropology.

Possibly, my appreciation of languages started when I discovered books. I've always been an avid reader and I enjoy reading books about foreign countries during historical periods that transport you to different places and times. As I read these books I can hear the way the people sound and the words take on new meaning as I imagine the characters interacting in their native vernacular. For me, languages allows me to step into other cultures and to see life from a different point of view. Charlemagne summed it up perfectly in his quote "to have another language is to possess a second soul."

The reality is that languages truly do give a view into the way people understand or perceive the world around them. Languages have perpetually developed and evolved since the dawn of time and give us a distinct window into culture, tradition and worldview. Case in point, a phrase can be spoken in one language and if spoken in another language the meaning can change slightly or can totally be lost in translation. This is a common occurrence when I try to interpret common Haitian Kreyol expressions into English. Sometimes it's difficult to find an adequate English expression that holds the same meaning.

Conversely, when I speak to my family in Kreyol we often intermingle English words into our conversation because some concepts are better conveyed in English. I'm sure this is how Krenglish was born. Kreyol + English = Krenglish. (Inside joke. You probably won't appreciate the humor as much as I do.)

I was reading an analysis on languages that posed the question does language shape the way people think? For decades this question has dazzle academics and caused much controversy among scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists. Seventy-years ago Benjamin Lee Whorf tantalized our intellect with the baffling concept about language’s power over the mind that basically stated that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. In other words, a person's mother language infringes on a speaker's sensibility in such a way that it prevents him/her from grasping totally different realities expressed in other languages. Whorf's theory further claimed that if a language has no term for a certain thought, then its speakers would not be able to understand this idea.

As you can imagine Whorf's hypothesis is very problematic. Simply because languages relay perceptions in different ways or in some cases fail to express some perceptions, certainly does not mean that the speaker isn't able to embrace new perceptions. Nonetheless, I do agree that languages do hold a certain power over the speaker's reality. Perfect examples of this is the fact that in French, Spanish, Russian and German objects are either feminine or masculine. Often times when speakers of these languages are talking about objects in English they will continue to identify them as feminine or masculine and actually perceive them this way. Most astonishing, is the discovery by anthropologist John Haviland, that certain aboriginal groups communicate personal space (i.e. front, back, right, left, etc) in terms of geographical direction. Hence, if they are pointing to an object to the right of themselves they would say the object is to the west or southwest of their body opposed to saying the object is behind or to the left of themselves.

Arguments have perpetuated for centuries regarding whether languages influence the way people view the world or vice versa. I am in no way a scholar or a linguist to even think I could embark on this debate. Nonetheless, from my mind's eye and from what I've witnessed it's evident to me that there is something to be said about a group of people through the way they communicate. Studies have shown that languages that use grammatical genders (i.e. French, German, Spanish, etc.) to identify objects can shape the emotions and associations the speaker has toward objects around them.

Languages offer a passageway into a culture's inclination and priorities. Take for instance in the English sentence structures, it focuses on the doer of acts and the consequences of those actions. Ergo, our criminal justice system seeks to find the culprit (the doer) and hold him or her liable, rather than finding the victims and atoning them appropriately. In Japanese and Spanish there is no identification of the doer of an act. For example in English we would say "I wrecked my car." However, in Japanese and Spanish the same sentence would be said "The car wrecked itself."

Languages  are human constructs that we invent and refine to suit our needs and culture. Languages allows us to uncover, to a degree, what makes us human, providing us a glimpse at the very characteristics of human nature. As we discover how languages and their people contrast, we ascertain that human beings too can differ tremendously, depending on the languages they speak.

One thing is certain it’s been proven that bi-lingual people think differently as they switch between languages. Encouraging my children learn new languages will help them have a broader worldview, which can help them develop divergent thinking, cultural sensitivity and may possibly even help solidify our Christian values.

It truly is the age old question about whether the chicken came first or the egg. Does language structure cultural beliefs or does culture influence our language? Perhaps it's both... What do you think?

image: flickr