How we speak can affect ways people treat us

 Carol Forsloff - "It's likely that a bilingual Arab Israeli will consider Arabs more positively in an Arab speaking environment than a Hebrew speaking
environment." This was the finding that supports a person's language might influence how he thinks about others.

The language a person speaks can impact how he or she feels about other cultures.  For example, the Jew who speaks Arabic will have a better feeling towards Arabs than the Jew who does not.  The same is true with other groups, according to a recent study.

The subjects in this study several years ago were Arab Israelis, fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic, who were students at Hebrew-speaking universities and colleges.  Researchers Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University and Robert Ward of Bangor University took into consideration the problems between Arabs and Israelis to design an experiment that looked at how the students think differently in Arabic and Hebrew.

The study used a computer test to flash certain words to reflect bias and to determine subjects association with certain words as positive or negative.  The Arab Israeli volunteers found it easier to associate Arab names with "good" trait words and Jewish names with "bad" trait words than Arab names with "bad" trait words and Jewish names with "good" trait words.

But this effect was much stronger when the test was given in Arabic; in the Hebrew session, they showed less of a positive bias toward Arab names over Jewish names.

"The language we speak can change the way we think about other people," is the summation of the study. The results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Shai Danziger, the author, learned both Hebrew and English as a child. "I am a bilingual and I believe that I actually respond differently in Hebrew than I do in English. I think in English I'm more polite than I am in Hebrew," he says. "People can exhibit different types of selves in different environments. This suggests that language can serve as a cue to bring forward different selves."

Language in general affects how we behave, something that a learned scholar and later politician told us in his treatise called Language in Thought and Action that people of all philosophies embrace in some ways, including atheists.  His thesis was that language affects how we think and behave and how others behave toward us.  It is considered a classic in linguistics.

We have examples of verbal abuse as well as verbal pronouncements that are positive that can affect change.  It is what we decide, it turns out, in how we choose to interact with others in language that affects how we may be treated in turn.