Does your language influence your financial behaviour?

Why is Greece nearly bankrupt, whilst Germany has a healthy economy? According to Yale behavioural economist Keith Chen, it's because of the different structures of the German and Greek languages. He has compared the amount of money saved by people of different nationalities. People whose native language has no distinct future tense (like Chinese or German, according to Chen) save on average and over time over $200,000 dollars more than people whose language does have a discrete future tense (like French or Greek). He has come to the conclusion that certain languages nudge speakers to think differently about the future -- those languages with a separate future tense cause speakers to find it harder to relate to their future selves, so they save less.

 

There are a number of problems with this theory. Most linguists discount the idea that language determines thought, although some bilingual speakers insist they think differently depending on the language they are speaking. In Chen's case, he perhaps doesn't help his cause by miscategorising languages. According to Chen, for instance, German and English are in different groups -- he says English has a future tense while German doesn't. Well, German and English form the way they talk about the future in a very similar way with an auxiliary verb plus main verb: I will do and ich werde machen. Moreover, it's possible to talk about a future event using a present tense in English -- I'm going on holiday tomorrow. Indeed, you could argue that English hasn't got a future tense at all; it certainly hasn't got a one-word future form with a discrete set of endings - as French does, for instance (je ferai).

Here's an article on the topic, and you can listen to a 5-minute interview too.

Comments

[Marc Leavitt]

Susan:
Mr. Chen is full of beans. English and German have two tenses; present and past. As you well know,both languages indicate futurity by using auxiliary verbs and other modalities. The distinction between "will" - to wish, want" (Old English "willan") and "willen" in German is slight. "Are you going? I will go. - Gehst du? Ich will(or werde) gehen." Werden is the grammatical auxiliary, but in colloquial speech, in German, willen is just as common. Other means of indicating futurity in English, for example, the participial "going to go" form, or the present simple form: "Are you going? Yes, I go tomorrow," all work quite well to indicate futurity in the absence of a tense form completed by an ending. Apparently Mr. Chen believes in Mr. Whorf's hypothesis concerning the influence of language on our perception of reality. What changes from language to language is prosody and nuance; that's why poetry is really not translateable in the true sense. Sorry for the rant

[Virtual Linguist]

That's very interesting, Marc. Thanks.

[Jemmy Hope]

I wonder which official language of the Republic of Ireland was responsible for that nation's financial woes.

[Virtual Linguist]

Yes .... Thanks, Jemmy. I think Irish Gaelic does have a separate, one-word, future tense. However, whoever is responsible for Ireland's financial woes, it's certainly not Gaeltacht residents!