The Link Between Language and Saving Money

by Chelsea Liu


Which countries have the highest saving propensities? The more developed? Those with high interest rates? High employment levels? High living standards? 

How about the structures of their language?

According to a TED talk, “futureless languages” tend to save 30% more per year than “future languages”. Professor Keith Chen, a behavioural economist has investigated this thought-provoking hypothesis by cooperating with cognitive scientists and linguists.

Professor Keith Chen

One example of a future language is English and this is the example that Professor Chen gave. To talk in the past tense, you would say “It rained”, in the present, it would change to “It is raining”, and when switching to talk in the future, you would modify the phrase to “It will rain”. Clearly, as you can see the root of the words changed. In English, the subject or the issues you are talking about will be distinctively divided into a certain category of time. That is, you would modify the word, such as the root, to specify which tense you are talking in. You would never say “It rain yesterday”, “It rain today” and “It rain tomorrow”. That, to us, is grammatically incorrect and just sounds weird. It is this idea of a distinction and discontinuity between the tenses that is linked to saving trends. This really appealed to me as, being bilingual of both a future (English) and futureless (mandarin) language, I could truly understand the difference personally and relate this to some phenomenons I see.

On the other hand, take mandarin, for instance, a futureless language. Here, “when it rained” is said in the seemingly awkward way — “It rain yesterday”，”昨天下雨”; “It rain today”, “今天下雨”; and “It rain tomorrow”; “明天下雨”. Yet these sentences in mandarin make entire sense. Maybe you can tell from the appearance that, out of the four characters in each group, the former 2 characters are different, whilst the latter 2 are the same. The former ones are basically the nouns of “yesterday”, “today” and “tomorrow” respectively, whilst the same 2 characters in every phrase means the verb “to rain”. The fact that we don’t change the “shape” (or “root”) of the characters correlates to saving trends.

So what exactly is the link? In the future language, the sudden disconnection gap between tenses portray a view to the speakers of that language that the future is different, and far apart from the present. This makes us less concerned and involved  in the future. We tend to only think and do the work that’s only in the present; we feel that we could wait till the gap decreases, then act, which would still be in time. We’re sort of procrastinating. It does not stimulate a similar feeling to what you would get for a futureless language. In this, there is a continuity which more closely links the future to the present. People talk in this language as if the future is just around a corner. This stimulates an action to happen to prepare for it, which is saving. 

As a result, according to Prof. Chen, those who speak futureless languages tend to save 30% more per year than those of future languages .They also retire with 25% more savings as well. This talk gave me insight into another aspect of language. Not only is it a tool of communication, but it can also cognitively affect one’s actions, not just daily behaviour, but one so significant as saving for the future.