Intro: Languages don’t just dictate who we talk to, they shape the way we think. Current Columbia College student Amanda Ong considers the how the languages we speak mold the way we learn to see and navigate the world, even when we are not speaking them.

When I was growing up, my dad would send me regular emails on why I should study Chinese more seriously, articles, anecdotes, books always linked. Emails would flow in: “Mandarin improves your ear for music,” “Mandarin speakers get into better schools.” I never did learn Mandarin. But I remember those emails, my father trying to reach me, and I remember this article in particular. It was based on a study that posed that languages that lacked a future tense decreased the distance between the present and the future, meaning that speakers were less likely to smoke, more likely to practice healthy habits, and more likely to save money. 

It has never been a secret that our language provides a frame through which we see the world. Every language, with its individual grammar, the extent of its vocabulary, the way it asks us to think about who we are speaking to, constructs the world we live in. 

When Dr. Nepia Mahuika came to speak to us two weeks ago, he spoke to the way that Maori oral history has frequently been discounted as mythology by the colonizers who came to New Zealand. It is for this reason that Dr. Mahuika began to write about Maori history—when he began college, he realized much of the Maori history maintained by academia was wrong, even as a rich historical source lived among the Maori people right on the same island. The idea that their stories were “myth,” he said, came in part from a lack of understanding of the Maori language, a language rich with metaphor. He made the example that the Maori say that their island was fished out of the sea by their ancestor Maui; the colonizers did not understand that “to fish out” is also a common way of saying “to discover.” Idioms natural to the language seemed fantastical to non-speakers. 

I often wonder what we leave behind when we move from our native language to a language that will make us more “comprehensible” to those around us and greater society. I think about this when I hear my mother use phrases of Cantonese parsed into English sentences. There are some words that you really just can’t quite say in any other way. 

I have to believe that with a language like Maori, a speaker’s sense of rich metaphor does not truly leave them, even as they move into English. In her Ted talk, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky explains how the Kook Thaayorre language orients the world not in relation to the individual speaking, not by left or right, but in cardinal directions. Because of this, speakers are much more aware of geographical markers and far better at directionally orienting themselves than others. 

In Ted Chiang’s short story, “The Story of Your Life,” later made into the movie The Arrival, a linguist is tasked with translating the language of aliens who have made contact with earth. However, it becomes apparent that these aliens do not experience linear time, but all of time at once—less like a speck along a running river, but a river frozen, all at still, all at once. There is no distinction between past, present, and future, and she begins to experience all of time at once too as she learns the language. She sees the future of a child she does not yet have. Even when she speaks English rather than the alien language, this becomes part of how she sees the world at any moment, even if just in glimmers. 

While the movie and short story are both clearly works of fiction, they do help us imagine the way language molds our thinking. Language is a way of knowing how to navigate the world. Once learned, something like that is not something you can lose, not completely.

I am never quite sure how we, as people who may not have the same native languages as those we interact with, can begin to bridge the differences of our languages when we interview and co-create. If we both speak to each other in the same language, how can we be cognizant and respectful of the way others have learned to navigate the world through their native tongue? It is a challenge that we often cannot detect but we must be sensitive to should we want to expand our language, our knowledge, and our histories. It is also why, as Dr. Mahuika had said, we must recognize oral history as valid in te rao Maori—as valid in every tongue, and not just English.

I am reminded of my dad’s appeals for me to learn Chinese. I realize now that he was not just asking me to improve my musical ear, or to get into a better school. He was asking me to see the world through my family’s, through my grandparent’s, native tongue, to know their minds a little more closely even when we speak to each other in English.

Amanda Ong is a senior in Columbia College studying both creative writing and ethnicity and race studies. She became interested in oral history through internships with StoryCorps and the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, but has a love for any and all forms of storytelling she can get her hands on, especially when they work to diversify existing narratives.

This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.