Learning a foreign language literally changes the way we see the world, according to new research. Panos Athana sopoulos of Newcastle University, England, has found that bilingual speakers think differently to those who only use one language. And you don't need to be fluent in the language to feel the effects - his research showed that it is language use, not proficiency, which makes the difference.
Working with both Japanese and English speakers, he looked at their language use and proficiency, along with the length of time they had been in the country, and matched this against how they perceived the colour blue. Colour perception is an ideal way of testing bilingual concepts because there is a huge variation between where different languages place boundaries on the colour spectrum. In Japanese, for example, there are additional basic terms for light blue (mizuiro) and dark blue (ao), which are not found in English. Further, ao also covers colours that English people would call 'green, such as a green traffic light.
Previous research has shown that people are more likely to rate two colours to be similar if they belong to the same linguistic category. 'We found that people who only speak Japanese distinguished more between light and dark blue than English speakers,' said Dr Athanasopoulos, whose research is published in the current edition of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 'The degree to which Japanese-English bilinguals resembled either norm depended on which of their two languages they used more frequently:
Most people tend to focus on how to do things such as order food or use public transport when they learn another language to help them get by but 'as well as learning vocabulary and grammar, you're also unconsciously learning a whole new way of seeing the world,' said Dr Athanasopoulos.