Photo credit: Meadbh Brown

A stack of books from various genres sits in a drawer. The stories we read and narratives we cathect build our worlds and shape our lives, reminding us that language doesn’t just describe our reality, but helps to create it.

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

How does language influence us? I hadn’t thought much about it until this year, when I learned about “l’écriture inclusive,” or “inclusive writing,” a French movement seeking to address linguistic inequality. French, like most Romance languages, is a gendered language. For instance, when referring to a group of people, one uses the “il” or “he” pronoun, even if there is just one man in a group of a thousand women. I hadn’t questioned these rules until I was in my international relations class the other day, and my teacher kept repeating something: “language matters.” 

This sparked the realization that the seemingly small rules of grammar have the capacity to shape the way we see the world. If a language defaults to the masculine, what does that say about who is seen as the default person, and who is the other? French philosopher and feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir claimed that those raised under these languages learn to view women as beneath men, making them the so-called “second sex.” If even our grammar creates these subconscious hierarchies, the way we are taught to speak, read, and therefore, think must carry enormous weight. 

Language also influences our perception and categorization of experience. Different languages use slightly different phrasing or ordering of words, which subconsciously change their meanings. In French, to say “I miss you,” one says “Tu me manques,” which, word for word, translates to “You are missing from me.” To say “I am sad” in Irish Gaelic, one says “Tá brón orm,” which translates more closely to “Sadness is on me.” 

Is it possible, then, that a child raised with French as their dominant language might subconsciously come to view their loved ones as extensions of themselves — so that, in their absence, something feels missing from their own sense of self? Could someone raised speaking Irish view emotions like joy and sorrow as ailments which are not them, but a temporary burden, like we view a headache (in English, we say I have a headache, not I am a headache)? 

So how might our own language shape our thoughts? In the 1990s, sight-reading, a method which taught children to recognize whole words by sight rather than sounding them out, rose to popularity in schools. It’s a beautiful and romantic thought: Language is so innate to human nature that children would have the capacity to see a word and recognize its meaning after being told a couple times, or reading it in the context of a story. 

It did not, however, pan out to be true. The practice was largely discontinued in schools in favor of phonics, a method of teaching reading which relies on sounding out individual letters and sounds which had far higher rates of literacy success. Similarly, we don’t stumble upon our views from somewhere deep down and suddenly have our opinions. Like words and eventually stories, they come from those little syllables, pieced together subconsciously to create our worldview.

Just as phonics taught us how words are built from smaller sounds, our worldviews are built from the subtle, invisible linguistic and cultural rules we internalize. Our grammar, idioms and the way we learn language become the scaffolding for how we perceive our world and ourselves. If we never study our patterns of language, we risk living in an unscrutinized and potentially outdated syntax. So the importance of questioning our cultural diet and which (and whose) ideas we may be ingesting cannot be overstated. 

Expanding and adapting our language (think master doc to mother doc — go Archer!) doesn’t just make us better writers and speakers. It makes our worlds bigger and our boundaries less fixed, challenging our preconceived notions and allowing us to grow and evolve with our changing world.