Languages are weird. If you grew up in America and only know English, you likely assume that it is a pretty normal language that isn’t that hard to learn. If you ask someone who is trying to learn it as an adult, however, they would likely tell you that it is confusing and often doesn’t make sense.

Similarly, if you only speak English and then you start trying to learn Spanish, for example, you might be weirded out by the fact that most things in the language have a gender associated with them.

Another area where languages have dramatic differences is in how they deal with the future tense. In English, for example, you might say that it will rain tomorrow. The word ‘will’ clearly indicates that it is something that happens in the future and not right now. In German, however, the most common way to say this translates to, “tomorrow it rains.” This isn’t just a German thing either, many languages including Norwegian, Estonian, Dutch, and Mandarin Chinese don’t have a set future tense.

This may seem like a small distinction, but some linguists and behavioralists think that this distinction may have a major impact on the behavior of those who speak the languages.

In 2013, behavioral economist at the Yale School of Management, Keith Chen, conducted a study on this specific topic. He looked at various outcomes in life and compared them between people who spoke languages with or without that future tense. The study attempted to compare people with similar income, family structure, country of birth, education, and other factors to get the most accurate results possible. In the study, he found that people whose native language did not have the well-defined future tenses had the following advantages:

• 31% More Likely to Save Money
• Retire with 39% More Wealth
• 24% Less Likely To Smoke
• 29% More Likely to Stay Physically Active
• 13% Less Likely to be Obese

Of course, these are major areas of people’s lives and there are undoubtedly many confounding factors that have an influence. The author of the study acknowledges this in the paper, where he said:

“One important issue in interpreting these results is the possibility that language is not causing but rather reflecting deeper differences that drive savings behavior.”

He went on to say:

“Self-reported measures of savings as a cultural value appear to drive savings behavior, yet are completely uncorrelated with the effect of language on savings. That is to say, while both language and cultural values appear to drive savings behavior, these measured effects do not appear to interact with each other in a way you would expect if they were both markers of some common causal factor. Nevertheless, the possibility that language acts only as a powerful marker of some deeper driver of intertemporal preferences cannot be completely ruled out.”

So, while additional study would be needed to determine exactly how much language impacts behavior, it does seem to at the very least be a factor. When the language treats the future as a part of today, such as in the German example above, people may feel more closely connected to the future, and make decisions that reflect this.

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