2. What is the relationship between language & thought? Do people speaking different languages experience a different reality? According to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, people who speak different languages DO experience different realities Inuit people – many words for snow, can differentiate between snow covered landscapes much better than others
3. How might speaking multiple languages affect a personal cognitive abilities? Bilingual speakers are better able to deal with distractions than those who speak only a single language Psychologists determined that individuals who spoke two languages with equal proficiency and used both equally did better than monolingual volunteers on tests that measured how quickly they could perform while distracted. Used Simon task, a test used to measure mental abilities. Test takers saw a red or a blue square flash on a computer screen and were told to hit the left or right shift key depending on the color. Three experiments showed that bilingual speakers of Cantonese and English, Tamil and English or French and English consistently outperformed English-only speakers The ability to hold two languages in the mind at the same time, without allowing words and grammar from one to slip into the other, might account for the greater control needed to perform well on the Simon task. Bilinguals may have superior working memories for storing and processing information.
4. What are the implications of a reduction in language diversity? As languages go extinct, possible ways of perceiving/describing the world are gone forever. Any reduction of language diversity diminishes its ability to adapt because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw. Loss of culture
5. How realistic is it that we may have a single unifying world language? Would this be to the world's advantage? Esperanto – artificially created auxiliary language After being recognized in 1954, estimates that only 10,000 – 2 million people can speak it Not very realistic expectation It would be advantageous as everyone would understand each other and there would be less ambiguity and communication issues It would not be advantageous as thousands of languages would be wiped out, and the different ways of describing the world would be lost forever.
