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Want to know yet another reason why learning more than one language makes you a superhuman? Simply put, every language is built upon a different structure of time! In other words, the way that you perceive time depends on the language/s you speak.

The Science of Time and the English Language

Time is our greatest resource. It underpins almost everything in our surroundings: schedules, calendars, deadlines, holidays, sleep, meals. However, some of us use our time more efficiently than others. What I choose to do with one hour could be worlds apart from what you choose to do with one hour. Each person is free to decide whether taking a one-hour nap or catching up on procrastinated work is a better use of that time. Still, that one hour is the same unit of time for both people, right? Well, maybe not.

Let’s look at this a bit more scientifically…

Two renowned linguists found that “…people who speak two languages fluently think about time differently depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.”(1) Does that sound confusing? Here are some examples to illustrate this concept.

English and Swedish people view time in terms of distance. They say things like ‘a long speech’ or ‘a short day’. According to these languages, time is a kind of region that is traversed. Greek and Spanish people see time in terms of quantity and say things like ‘a small break’ or ‘a full day’. For them, time is a mass that is either bite-size or too big to swallow. So, for the Swedes and English, time is distance travelled, whereas for Greeks or Spaniards, it is volume taking up space. Based on this we can see that Europeans see time as a horizontal axis, moving from left (past) to right (future). But what happens when we look outside of Europe?

Chinese Mandarin is well known as one of the toughest languages to master. The Chinese have an alternative axis of time, one that is structured up-down (past-future) – a vertical orientation. In Mandarin, you would not say ‘next week’, you would say ‘down week’. Additionally, ‘last week’ is translated as ‘up one week’ because they see the past as going upward.

Now let’s look at Aymara, a language from the central Andes. Future (quipuru) for these people translates to ‘behind time’. When they mention future events, they point backwards – a very strange gesture of time for Westerners! However, the reason that they do this is inarguably logical. To these people, the past is known, can be seen, like what you can see in front of your eyes, therefore it is located in a frontwards direction. The future, on the other hand, is unknown, like what is behind you, what you cannot see, therefore it is located in a backwards direction.  

For a final example to completely blow your mind, there are even languages that exist with no tenses at all! The Yucatec Maya’s language is completely devoid of tense, and they have no translations for the words such as after or before. They convey time through context. Basically, they don’t describe when but how something happens. These contextual details, rather than time specifications, give their stories a philosophical quality. Oddly enough, the lack of time in their language makes their stories more universally relevant.

As the renowned linguist Emanuel Bylund said, “If you speak two languages, then you can sort of inhabit two world views at the same time, and you can flexibly switch between them. As a bilingual speaker, you can have two different time perceptions. That’s fascinating.”

So, why on earth is all of this relevant to you as a language student? The answer is pretty obvious - tenses. If the languages we speak determine how we perceive time, and every language perceives time differently, then it is no surprise why some tenses in other languages can seem so puzzling and, let’s be honest, unnecessary! We have all found ourselves wondering, ‘Why on earth does [insert desired foreign language here] need to have this complex tense? My native language’s tenses are much more useful.’ Well, now you know the answer. Every language is influenced by its own culture, and one culture is never the same as another. When you’re in class next week, wanting to give up on learning a second language because the tenses seem impossible, ask yourself this question: How does the culture behind this language perceive time?

Foreign Friend Online – Learning English Online

In the upcoming blog posts I will be dedicating an individual article to each of the 12 English tenses. Be sure to read them if you want patient explanations and real, practical examples of how and when to use each one.

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