What Would Orwell Think?

Big Think has a report on a curious finding that language influences behavior, in particular that languages that do not crisply distinguish between present and future (not strongly "future time referencing"=FTR) have speakers who tend to save more for a rainy day. English (and Greek) maintain strong distinctions between present and future, not like German or Chinese.

Being clear about the timing of your topic turns out to be one of the areas where grammars differ. Some tongues, including English, are strong future-time-reference, or FTR, languages: If Chen, a professor at Yale's School of Management, wants to say he can't meet you tomorrow because he has a seminar, he has to say "I am going to listen to a seminar." On the other hand, others are weak FTR languages. In Mandarin, Chen would say Wˇo qù t ̄ıng jiˇangzuo ("I go listen seminar," where "go" just means that he's heading over, nothing to do with when).

Chen theorized that weak-FTR languages would be more conducive to future-oriented behavior because, in those grammars, the future feels the same as the present. Linguists have mapped strong and weak FTR languages in Europe, so Chen correlated that information with data on behaviors that sacrifice present pleasures for the future self, like saving, exercising and avoiding tobacco (culled from the World Values Survey, the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, and the OECD's trove of reports on economic behavior since 1970).

His results are rather mind-boggling: In Europe, speakers of weak-FTR languages (German, Finnish and Estonian are examples) were 30 percent more likely to have saved money in a given year than were equivalent speakers of a strong-FTR language (English, Spanish or Greek, for instance). (To put that in perspective, according to Chen's analysis, speaking a strong-FTR language is as a big a risk-factor for not-saving as unemployment.) Weak-FTR language-speakers have piled up an average of 170,000 more euros per person for their retirement than strong-FTR speakers, and are 24 percent less likely to have smoked heavily, 29 percent more likely to exercise regularly, and 13 percent less likely to be obese.

I'd like to see that verified before I try to draw conclusions from it, but it reminds me a little of NewSpeak: a language designed to make some kinds of thoughts impossible to think. That, given human nature, seems to me to be impossible; but we easily see that a culture's vocabulary (catch phrases and connotations for key words) can make some kinds of thoughts easy to express, and others harder. Members of different subcultures in our own land talk past each other, unable to communicate the wealth of nuance one side or the other vests in words like "fairness." Perhaps a grammar can have a similar influence.