And does the language we speak shape the way we think? These are the Kuktayer people. They live in Pohnpurao, at the very west edge of Cape York. In Kuktayer, they don't use words like left and right. And instead, everything is in cardinal directions, north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg. Or move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit. In fact, the way that you say hello in Kuktayer is, which way are you going? And the answer should be, north-northeast in the far distance, how about you? People who speak languages like this stay oriented really, really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because some biological excuse. Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales. No. If your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. Lots of languages have grammatical gender. So every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine, and these genders differ across languages. Could this have any consequence for how people think? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here, a bridge happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish, German speakers are more likely to say bridges are beautiful, elegant, these stereotypically feminine words, whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're strong or long, these masculine words. Languages also differ in how they describe events. In English, it's fine to say, he broke the vase. In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, the vase broke or the vase broke itself. If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, I broke my arm. Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm and you succeeded. People who speak different languages will pay attention to different things depending on what their language usually requires them to do. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, why do I think the way that I do? How could I think differently? And also, what thoughts do I wish to create? Learn English for free www.engvid.com