The way you gesticulate with your hands - even the way soap operas are filmed - depends on the language you think in.
Start describing the layout of your house, and you'll soon find yourself waving your hands about. As an English-speaker, your hand gestures will be different from those of Japanese or Turkish speakers describing the same thing, says Dr Sotaro Kita, from the University of Bristol. He has been comparing the hand gestures people use when describing cartoons they have just watched.
The English sentence "Tarzan swung from one tree to another" cannot be readily translated into Japanese or Turkish, because they have no verb "to swing," he said yesterday.
Arc gestures are used by English speakers when they are verbalising this scene. Turkish or Japanese subjects are more likely to use straight gestures, he said. "Spontaneous gestures that accompany speech are a window into the mind." So too are soap operas, said Prof Barbara Tversky, from Stanford University. Some languages have fewer words to describe motion than does English. While we swagger, scurry and skip in and out of rooms, other languages make do with enter and exit. This is reflected in the way motion is depicted in soap operas, she said. German and English soaps show characters moving between scenes. Spanish and Japanese directors tend to show the character in one scene and then cut straight to the character in the next, she said.
These studies show that "the way you phrase things affects the way you think about them", said Dr Debi Robertson from the University of Essex. It also argues for the preservation of all the world's languages, said Dr Kita.
"Linguistic diversity entails diversity in thoughts." To reduce it is to lose conceptual diversity, he said.