Your Language and Your Financial Health

There was an interesting article last week about recent research into the influence of language on savings. Apparently, people whose mother tongue makes a strong distinction between the present and future using different tenses (like English, Spanish, and French) tend to save less than those who speak a language where there is weak distinction, such as German, Mandarin and Finnish.

Here's the graph.

And a rather academic explanation.

It is as if grammatical marking of the difference between the present and the future insulates you from seeing that the two are coterminous so you should plan ahead. Using present-tense forms for future time reference, on the other hand, encourages you to see that the future is just more of the present, and thus encourages you to put money in a 401(k).

From what I can decipher, people who speak languages that make sharp distinctions between the present and the future tend to forget the latter and live it up in the moment. Meanwhile, those who think of the present and future within the same scope, try to stretch their money to make it through a never ending day.

Personally, I don't know how much credence I put in Whorfian linguistic relativity which believes language structures influences the way we conceptualize the world. My grandparents and parents are both English speakers. One saved a lot and was more frugal after surviving the great depression, while the other grew up in the era of easy credit and mass consumerism. Culture, and those who shape it, have a much greater impact on our lifestyles than how we speak, me thinks.