IN the region of Micronesia, you can find different groups of people with their own identities and languages.
Many researchers, for their part, have looked into how language can change the way people think or relate to the world around them.
According to Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology, “The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world.”
Not just language, but writing style, too, can provide clues to group identity, according to a new study conducted by the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
“Switches between identities influence behavior in multiple ways, and in our study we tracked which identity was active by focusing on language. We found that people not only change their writing style to impress their audience — they change it based on the group identity that is influencing them at the time.”
The researchers “studied how people who are parents and feminists change their writing style when they move from one identity to another on anonymous online forums….”
“People are not just one thing — we change who we are, our identity, from situation to situation,” said Dr Miriam Koschate-Reis, of the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, both at the University of Exeter.
In his 1993 thesis on the Caroline Islands script submitted to the University of Hawaii, Alexander Johan de Voogt explained the importance of indigenous language to local culture and identity.
There is a language for every place, linguist Ryan Denzer-King wrote on his blog site.
He added, “People are too quick to say ‘Learn English if you want to live in America,’ even though most of our ancestors didn’t bother to learn Cherokee or Delaware or Kitsai or Karuk when they came to America. Perhaps we don’t like to think about such things because we don’t have those ties to our ancestors. My grandmother’s grandfather lived all his life in a place I have never seen, and all his life spoke a language I can’t understand. Maybe we devalue the connection between language and place because it’s something most of us can never hope to have.”
Something to think about.
