How Language Shapes the Way We See Time and Space

As a Welsh speaker living in England who has spent years trying to get his kids speaking Welsh, I never imagined that speaking a particular language might also shape the way they think about something as fundamental as time and space.

But that is exactly what cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky has shown.

Her research demonstrates that speakers of different languages experience time in genuinely different spatial orientations:

• English speakers tend to experience time flowing horizontally, left to right — always into the future.
• Hebrew speakers experience it right to left — matching the direction their language is written and read.
• Mandarin speakers organise time vertically — up for the past, down for the future. In Mandarin, "next week" literally translates as "down week."

Think about that for a moment. The language you speak doesn't just give you different words for the same concepts — it gives you a fundamentally different spatial framework for those concepts.

This was shared with me this morning by my mam (diolch, Mam!) and it stopped my scroll immediately. I've been making the case for Welsh alongside English for years — the practicality of it, the cultural value, the connection to home, the sheer beauty of the language. But I hadn't expected science to hand me a new and deeply interesting dimension to that argument.

For what it's worth: my kids are getting there. Dal ati!

#Language #Welsh #Cymraeg #Culture #Cognition