Some books just stick with you. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of them. It was one of only two books that I was assigned to read in multiple classes in college. At Om Ben’s memorial service, my colleague Isaac Kramnick called it the “second-most important book […]
Category: Language
The Language You Speak Predicts Your Beliefs, Values, and Behaviors
Several weeks back I tweeted the preliminary results from a new research project that uses World Values Survey data to test the linguistic relativity thesis. Speakers of languages whose word for “tea” is borrowed from the Mandarin “cha” rather than the Taiwanese “te” are statistically significantly more likely to believe that their political system should […]
