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A sweeping exploration of the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells.We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn't the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms-in English, for example, we speak of time "passing us by"-speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for "time" at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors themselves: a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What's more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like "floral" or "stinky," whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen.Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one's "left" or "right," while others use geocentric words like "east" and "west"? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into the fundamentals of human communication and experience

Previous studies have established that, in languages without epicene pronouns such as English, speakers overwhelmingly construe putatively generic terms such as 'mankind' as masculine, and that similar results hold for the construal of referents denoted by supposedly generic uses of masculine pronouns. What has not been addressed in the literature is whether speakers of languages without epicene pronouns exhibit greater androcentrism in the construal of non-gendered stimuli, even without being prompted with gender-biased terms. The results of two cross-linguistic tasks on gender construal are discussed here. Subjects were shown cartoons of non-gendered figures and asked to name the figures after a short linguistically-oriented distracter task. Patterns in the naming task suggest that speakers of English exhibit more androcentrism in their construal of gender-neutral stimuli, when contrasted to speakers of Karitiâna, a language that relies heavily on epicene pronoun usage.

AbstractContemporary political ills at the mass behavior level (e.g., outgroup aggression, conspiracy theories) are often attributed to increasing polarization and partisan tribalism. We theorize that many such problems are less the product of left‐right orientations than an orthogonal "anti‐establishment" dimension of opinion dominated by conspiracy, populist, and Manichean orientations. Using two national surveys from 2019 and 2020, we find that this dimension of opinion is correlated with several antisocial psychological traits, the acceptance of political violence, and time spent on extremist social media platforms. It is also related to support for populist candidates, such as Trump and Sanders, and beliefs in misinformation and conspiracy theories. While many inherently view politics as a conflict between left and right, others see it as a battle between "the people" and a corrupt establishment. Our findings demonstrate an urgent need to expand the traditional conceptualization of mass opinion beyond familiar left‐right identities and affective orientations.