7/27/2019 Why Speaking English Can Make You Poor When You Retire

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Why speaking English can make you pwhen you retireBy Tim Bowler Business reporter, BBC News 

Not all languages require the use of a future tense

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Could the language we speak skew our financial decision-making, anddoes the fact that you're reading this in English make you less likely than aMandarin speaker to save for your old age?

It is a controversial theory which has been given some weight by new findingsfrom a Yale University behavioural economist, Keith Chen.

Prof Chen says his research proves that the grammar of the language we speak

affects both our finances and our health.

Bluntly, he says, if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age,smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin,Yoruba or Malay.

Future-speak 

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Prof Chen divides the world's languages into two groups, depending on how theytreat the concept of time.

Continue reading the main story 

If your language separates the future and the present in its grammar,that seems to lead you to slightly disassociate the future from thepresent” 

Keith ChenYale University

Strong future-time reference languages (strong FTR) require their speakers touse a different tense when speaking of the future. Weak future-time reference(weak FTR) languages do not.

"If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can't attend ameeting later today, I could not say 'I go to a seminar', English grammar wouldoblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'.

"If, on the other hand, I were speaking Mandarin, it would be quite natural for meto omit any marker of future time and say 'I go listen seminar' since the contextleaves little room for misunderstanding," says Prof Chen.

Even within European languages there are clear grammatical differences in theway they treat future events, he says.

"In English you have to say 'it will rain tomorrow' while in German you can say'morgen regnet es' - it rains tomorrow."

Disassociating the future Speakers of languages which only use the present tense when dealing with thefuture are likely to save more money than those who speak languages whichrequire the use a future tense, he argues.

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Continue reading the main story 

  Strong FTR languages: Chaha, English, French, Fula, Gamo, Hausa, Igbo, Italian, Moore,

Russian, Tigrinya, Tamil

  Weak FTR languages: Amharic, Dyula, Estonian, German, Malay, Mandarin, Oromo,

Sidamo, Yoruba

  More from BBC World Service's Business Daily programme 

  Browse the Business Daily podcast archive 

So how does a mere difference in grammar cause people to save less for their retirement?

"The act of savings is fundamentally about understanding that your future self -the person you're saving for - is in some sense equivalent to your present self,"Prof Chen told the BBC's Business Daily.

"If your language separates the future and the present in its grammar that seemsto lead you to slightly disassociate the future from the present every time youspeak.

"That effectively makes it harder for you to save."

Even more controversial, is Prof Chen's assertion that language differencesunderpin wider differences in people's behaviour.

In his research paper , he says that compared to speakers of languages which

use a future tense, speakers of languages with no real future tense are:

  Likely to have saved 39% more by the time they retire

  31% more likely to save in a year 

  24% less likely to smoke

  29% more likely to be physically active

  13% less likely to be obese

Far-fetched? Not surprisingly, Prof Chen's findings have been criticised by both economistsand linguists.

They argue there are a number of cultural, social, or economic reasons whydifferent language speakers behave differently.

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It is a point Prof Chen acknowledges, saying "I completely agree, it seemed far-fetched to me when I started doing this research as well."

But he says his research has controlled for all these factors, by concentrating onnine multi-lingual countries: Belgium, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Estonia, DR

Congo, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore, and Switzerland.

"You can find families that live right next door to each other, have exactly thesame education levels, exactly the same income and even exactly same religion.

"Yet the family that speaks a language that doesn't distinguish between thefuture and the present will save dramatically more," he says.

In Nigeria, for example, Hausa has multiple future tenses, while Yoruba does not.

"You can find Nigerians who speak Hausa and Yoruba who live next to eachother and yet have radically different savings behaviour."

Findings challenged Continue reading the main story 

The extent to which the language shapes the thought is tiny” 

John McWhorterColumbia University

But Morten Lau, director of Durham University's Centre for BehaviouralEconomics, says the factors which affect how much people save have little to dowith language.

"In my own work with savings, it is interest rates that determine savingsbehaviour."

Prof Lau says there are often significant differences within language groups, and just using the average of these results in analysis can prove problematic.

"You have to be careful the inferences you make from correlations like these. It isvery difficult to control for multiple factors."

"For instance, in our own research in Denmark, we found that male smokerswanted a higher interest rate on their savings than did non-smokers. But that thisdid not apply to women smokers."

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'A tempting idea' Linguist John McWhorter, of Columbia University, says any influence alanguage's structure has on the way its speakers see their world is extremelysubtle.

"The extent to which the language shapes the thought is tiny. We're talking aboutmilliseconds of reaction.

Language has very little effect on the way we

think, say linguists

"None of it has ever been proven to have anything to do with how people see theworld or experience life.

"It's a tempting idea that simply doesn't make any sense."

 Also, he says, some languages have been wrongly classified, thus underminingthe statistical correlations.

"Russian, and languages like it, are a lot more like Mandarin than Keith Chenthinks."

Despite his critics, Prof Chen insists his findings are robust.

"What's remarkable, is when you find correlations this strong and that survive somany aggressive sets of controls, it's actually hard to come up with a story of what else might be causing this."

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So what does Prof Chen think of the idea that if he is right, then English speakerswho want to start saving more for their retirement, should start talking entirely inthe present tense?

"It actually seems like encouraging yourself to think in the present tense makes it

a little bit easier to engage in self-control."