A compelling interview recently on National Public Radio (read/listen to it here) got me thinking about the power of language to influence the way we think. Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist at Stanford, asserted a connection between the language that we use and the way it makes us perceive the world around us. Her experiment involved testing how separate groups who spoke German and Spanish used verbs to describe a bridge. The German speakers, in whose language a “bridge” has a feminine gender, used words like “beautiful,” “slender” and “elegant,” while the Spanish speakers, in whose language a “bridge” has a masculine gender used words like “strong,” “sturdy” and “towering.”

To further test her hypothesis that people’s thoughts were impacted by their language, Boroditsky invented a language called Gumbuzi. Her findings indicated that people’s grammatical understanding did affect their sense of the world around them.

This is a developing area of science and there are a number of viewpoints on this topic. For marketers, it does raise the issue about how we can use language as part of our copy messaging to arouse or induce certain unconscious perspectives in our target audience, especially where regional dialects may be in play. I’d be interested if you copy writers out there have any experience or opinion of this phenomenon. Let me know …