Upon reading this prompt, I’m immediately drawn to my own culture as a British, English speaking individual and how this affects both what I can learn as well as the way I learn.

While English is just the language I happened to be born into using, it is almost globally used to the point where many find no need in learning extra languages. Already, this impacts hugely the information ( such as word translations ) we can know, but more than that, is the problem of having such a small perception of the world rooted just in our obstinance to learn another language? Following Whorf’s Linguistic determinism, our language limits the knowledge we can comprehend. For example, many expressions and idioms are unique to the languages they come from, and hold contextual meaning or cultural significance, as well as having weight on location. For example, for it to be raining “cats and dogs”, most of us assume it to be chucking it down, heavily raining. But thanks to the rainfall in the UK being so high, those from more arid locations or sunnier areas like in the Med, may misinterpret the meaning of this expression. This is due to their having a different perspective of the meanings and ideas of words, built up over time by differences in habitation, and culture (through language and ideas of what things are). This calls into question if there is a difference between learning a language and “knowing it” For example, does it matter if I learn French, since I will always only think of French in terms of English, rather than in terms of French, and therefore not gain any new perspective on the meaning of words? The follow up to this being : what requires us to experience new points of view?

What we may begin to understand is that different cultures and languages very much have weight on what we can know. Of course, many would claim that language and word meanings can be subjective to begin with, but even when casting this aside we see that the issue of the way we learn is rooted in how we grow up. This creates potential for those who have greater terms/ words for similar things to develop a greater understanding/knowledge over that subject (like bilinguals), as defined by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In summary, it is very possible our social customs and definitions make us biased in the interaction with new information, and block us, even after taking in new forms of communication, from different perspectives gained through the complete knowledge of a language.

Ivan Sproats.