Language shapes your view of the world: ‘Mountains can lead to more references to height in your language’
Vidi grant image: Nehir Aksel
How is the language we speak linked to the way we understand the world? With her new Vidi project, Assistant Professor Sara Petrollino aims to get closer to an answer to that question.
Petrollino focuses specifically on the representation of time and space. ‘Because time is such a vague concept, we talk about it in terms of space,’ explains Petrollino. ‘How we do that varies from language to language. In English, when you talk about the future, you’re referring to something that lies ahead of you. In some Bolivian languages, by contrast, the future lies behind you, whilst in some Chinese expressions it lies beneath you.’ So the differences are well known. What remains unclear is what causes them. Petrollino: ‘Is it down to culture, the physical environment in which a language is spoken, or something else entirely?’
To answer that question, Petrollino turns his attention to the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, which is a World Heritage Site because the bones of the earliest hominids were found there. For linguists, the area is of interest because of the great diversity of languages spoken there within a small geographical area. ‘If you drive from north to south, you see different groups of people with different architectural styles, clothing styles, cultural customs and languages,’ explains Petrollino. ‘At the same time, there is overlap in their living environments and the ways in which they make a living. This makes it an interesting area for testing how language, environment, cultural practices and ways of life can interact in shaping spatial and temporal conceptualisation.’
Three languages
Three of the communities in the Omo Valley are the Hamar, Aari and Kwegu. ‘The Hamar live in both the mountains and the lowlands,’ says Petrollino. ‘From previous research, I know that the language has a rich system of spatial expressions in which height, distance, visibility, geography and movement interact. Whereas in English, for example, we would say that a small house is “to the left of” a large house, in Hamar this relationship can be expressed by saying that the small house is “downstream of” the large house.’
Petrollino wants to know whether such spatial systems influence the way people talk about time. Whereas in English the future lies ‘ahead’ of us, an approaching year or season can be described in Hamar as something that comes ‘from above or uphill’, she explains. ‘In the project, we are investigating whether the way speakers use their environment to organise space is linked to the way they conceptualise time.’
Comparison
In the first phase of her project, Petrollino is focusing on the Hamar’s system of determining time and space. To this end, she will spend a considerable amount of time living alongside the community. This ‘participant observation’ will then be combined with documentation and analysis of the spontaneously spoken language and cognitive tests, with the aim of ultimately understanding temporal concepts in relation to everyday practices, environments and cultural knowledge.
This is followed by a comparison with Aari and Kwegu, carried out in collaboration with a PhD student and a postdoc. ‘Aari is spoken exclusively in the mountains,’ explains Petrollino. ‘We know from previous research that altitude can play an important role in the language’s expression of space in mountainous environments, but at the same time, the Aari are farmers. They do not have a pastoral culture like the Hamar, and their cultural practices are different, which may introduce other influences.’
A third factor comes into play among Kwegu speakers. They live by the river and traditionally make their living as fishermen. Petrollino: ‘That offers a very different ecological and cultural context to that of the Aari and Hamar. By comparing these communities, we can investigate whether and how different environments, ways of life and cultural practices are linked to different ways of speaking and thinking about space and time.’
Intercultural collaboration
In doing so, Petrollino will be working closely with Ethiopian researchers and other interested parties. ‘We intend to bring Ethiopian and European students and researchers together at a “field school”. In this way, we aim to foster collaboration, knowledge exchange and student engagement between Ethiopian and European researchers and students.’