Language as a worldview. Metaphors that shape our perception

Chapter 1. The Phonetics of Landscape: How the Land May Shape Vowels and Consonants

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Settle into your chair and pour yourself a cup of tea. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that we are standing high in the Caucasus Mountains, somewhere nearly three thousand meters above sea level.

Around us stretch miles of jagged granite. The wind whistles through the peaks. Cliffs plunge into deep ravines where a single misstep could be fatal. The air is thin enough that each breath feels unfamiliar.

Now imagine that you need to shout something important to a person on the next mountainside.

“Watch out for the rockfall!”

Would you pronounce the words softly and melodically, stretching out the vowels like an operatic aria? Or would you instinctively choose short, sharp, clearly defined sounds that can cut through wind and echo without dissolving into the distance?

This simple thought experiment leads us to one of the most intriguing questions in linguistics.

Can the environment itself — mountains, forests, plains, coastlines — have any influence on the way a language sounds?

At first glance, the question may seem unusual. We are accustomed to thinking of language as something created by people. Yet people never exist in a vacuum. They live among rivers and deserts, in valleys and grasslands, on islands and mountain plateaus. For centuries they speak, listen, and communicate within spaces that possess their own acoustics, their own constraints, and their own possibilities.

Of course, language cannot be reduced to geography. It is shaped by history, migration, warfare, trade, religion, education, and countless other forces. Yet some researchers have suggested that the environment may also leave traces of its influence — not only in vocabulary, but occasionally even in the very sounds of speech.

If this idea is even partly correct, language becomes something more than a cultural invention. It becomes an archive of interaction between human beings and the world around them.

In this chapter, we will try to view languages as acoustic landscapes. We will travel through the mountain gorges of the Caucasus, step out onto vast open steppes, listen closely to the voices of forests and sea coasts, and explore how different environments may shape the conditions in which speech develops.

And perhaps we will discover something unexpected: when people speak, the land on which they live may sometimes be speaking as well.

Because every language is more than the story of a people.

It is also the story of a place — a place where generations learned, over centuries, how to hear one another.

1.1 Echoes of Stone and Explosive Consonants

Let’s try a small experiment.

Right now, wherever you are, attempt to produce a sound like k’ — not with the front of your mouth, but deep in your throat, as if you were forcefully pushing air upward from the very bottom of your larynx. Imagine trying to crack an invisible walnut with your tongue.

Can you feel the muscles in your neck tighten?

For many speakers of European languages, that effort feels unusual. Yet for millions of people around the world, sounds like these are as natural a part of everyday speech as an ordinary k or h is for English speakers.

Linguists call these sounds ejective consonants. They are produced through a distinctive movement of the larynx and create a sharp, burst-like acoustic effect. What makes them especially intriguing is their geographic distribution. Ejective consonants occur with notable frequency in languages spoken in mountainous regions of the world, including the Caucasus, parts of the Ethiopian Highlands, and several high-altitude areas of the Andes.

At first glance, that may seem like nothing more than coincidence.

Yet it is a remarkably intriguing coincidence.

Imagine a person living among gorges, cliffs, and mountain passes. Their world is shaped by vertical space. Here, a voice constantly struggles against the wind, rebounds from stone walls, fragments into echoes, and fades into the distance. In such an environment, communication itself can become a small daily negotiation with the landscape.

Could centuries spent in settings like these have influenced which sounds proved easier to hear, more noticeable, or more reliable for transmitting speech?

Some researchers believe that such a connection is plausible. One hypothesis suggests that the prevalence of ejective consonants in high-altitude regions may not be entirely accidental. It is important to emphasize, however, that this is a statistical pattern rather than a law of nature.

Languages never evolve for a single reason. History, migration, contact between communities, social structures, and countless other forces all shape the course of linguistic change. Yet the idea remains captivating.

If the hypothesis is even partly correct, then some speech sounds may preserve traces of a landscape long after generations have passed. The terrain itself may have left faint fingerprints on the language.

Few places illustrate this possibility more vividly than the Caucasus. To an unfamiliar ear, many Caucasian languages can sound like intricate compositions of glottal bursts, hissing consonants, and abrupt acoustic turns. Where an outsider hears an almost indistinguishable stream of sounds, a native speaker perceives subtle distinctions in meaning. Two consonants may differ only in the position of the tongue or the movement of the larynx, yet to the speaker the contrast is as obvious as the difference between neighboring notes to a trained musician.

And at that point, an unusual thought begins to emerge.

What if language is not solely a creation of human society?

What if every language has a second, silent co-author?

Not only the history of the people who speak it, but also the land on which those people lived for centuries.

Perhaps that is why some languages sound as though the mountains are still calling to one another through them.

Historical Aside: Mountains as Laboratories of Linguistic Diversity

In the first half of the twentieth century, the prominent linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy observed a striking pattern. Mountain regions around the world often turn out to be true museums of linguistic diversity.

The reason lies not so much in the sounds themselves as in geography. Mountains both connect and separate people. Two villages may be only a few kilometers apart, yet divided by a pass, a ravine, or an impassable ridge. As a result, communities remain relatively isolated for centuries, and their speech gradually develops along its own path.

This is why the Caucasus is often described as one of the most linguistically diverse areas on Earth. Within a relatively small territory, dozens of languages coexist — many of them featuring highly complex consonant systems.

It is important to note that linguists do not consider mountains to be a direct cause of specific phonetic systems. However, geographical isolation creates conditions in which languages can preserve ancient features and develop unique characteristics without being absorbed into larger linguistic systems.

In this sense, the mountain landscape does not act as an architect of language, but rather as its custodian — a kind of vault in which rare forms of human speech are preserved over centuries.

1.2 An Ocean of Grass and Floating Vowels

Now let’s leave the mountain gorges behind and move into a completely different world.

Imagine the Mongolian or Kazakh steppe — so vast that your eyes eventually give up trying to find where earth meets sky. The horizon dissolves into haze. Grass ripples in waves like a green sea. Wind travels freely for dozens of kilometers without meeting forests, cliffs, or city walls to break its path.

You are standing in the middle of this space alone.

A horse shifts quietly nearby, hooves pressing softly into the ground.

And nothing else.

Now try to call out to someone far ahead of you. What happens to your voice? Does it become sharp and clipped? Or does it stretch outward — wide, open, almost melodic — like it wants to glide across the land for as long as possible?

Of course, language is not built according to the acoustic laws of the steppe. But the image itself invites a question: can the spaces humans inhabit over generations leave subtle traces in how they perceive sound?

Some languages of the steppe belt do, in fact, give the impression of being unusually vocalic. Vowel sounds play a central role in them, along with vowel length, harmony, and smooth transitions between syllables. This is especially well known in Mongolic and Turkic languages, where vowels often form complex systems of mutual adjustment that linguists refer to as vowel harmony.

For a speaker of such a language, a word does not feel like a sequence of separate sounds. It is more like a single melodic wave. A change in one vowel can reshape the entire acoustic structure of the word, as if one note were retuning an entire chord.

Interestingly, this kind of phonological organization is found among peoples whose histories have long been tied to the open landscapes of Eurasia. Of course, this does not mean that the steppe caused vowel harmony. Contemporary linguistics offers no such evidence. But the parallel itself is strikingly beautiful.

Mountains seem to fragment space into separate valleys.

The steppe, by contrast, gathers it into a single horizon.

And sometimes it feels as if the languages of these worlds reflect the same logic.

Try a small experiment.

Say the Russian word dom (“house”) out loud.

Now stretch the vowel:

do-o-o-m.

Then round your lips a little more and let the sound flow with your breath.

Physically, it becomes a completely different experience. The body begins to work differently. Speech turns less segmented and more fluid. The sound no longer shoots forward in a single burst — it unfolds in space.

Of course, speakers of Mongolian or Kazakh do not speak in a certain way because of the steppe around them. The history of language is far more complex than any elegant hypothesis. But such experiments help us feel something important: every language develops its own acoustic aesthetics — its own sense of which sounds feel natural, beautiful, and expressive.

And here the scale of our inquiry expands once again.

We begin to understand that language is not only a tool for transmitting information. It is also a way of experiencing space.

Some cultures have lived for centuries among vertical landscapes of cliffs and passes.

Others among endless horizons.

Some have seen boundaries every day.

Others, continuity without visible edges.

And perhaps the memory of these worlds has been preserved not only in songs, legends, and ways of life, but also in the musical fabric of speech itself.

When we listen to the language of a nomad, we do not hear the steppe itself.

And yet sometimes it feels as though the wind of open spaces is still breathing through its vowels.

1.3 The Ice Castle of Scandinavia

Now let’s travel even farther north.

Imagine a winter morning somewhere in Norway or Finland. The air is so cold that every exhale turns into a small cloud of vapor. Snow muffles all sound. The sea disappears behind a gray haze. The trees stand motionless, as if they themselves have become part of the ice.

In a landscape like this, one thing becomes especially vivid: warmth.

The warmth of a home.

The warmth of light.

The warmth of a human voice.

Listen to the speech of Northern European cultures. Many foreigners describe it as calm, measured, restrained — not necessarily quiet, but rarely resembling the kind of emotional fireworks often associated with Mediterranean countries.

Now let’s mentally move south.

A narrow street somewhere in Sicily. Open windows. Conversations spilling out from balconies. Laughter. Gestures. Voices overlapping each other. It feels as though speech here occupies as much space as sunlight itself.

A striking contrast emerges.

North and south.

Restraint and expressiveness.

Even intonation versus emotional amplitude.

Of course, it would be far too simplistic to explain this difference through climate alone. Languages are shaped by history, culture, social norms, and countless other forces. Still, some scholars suggest that climate and environment may indirectly contribute to the formation of a society’s communicative habits.

Not so much the sounds of language themselves, but the ways those sounds are used.

After all, language does not exist in dictionaries. It exists between people.

If most of the year is lived in cold temperatures, limited space, and long winters, societies tend to develop their own norms of behavior, communication, and emotional expression. In warmer regions, those norms may look quite different.

This is not about biology or the structure of the vocal apparatus. It is about culture.

About what kind of way of speaking feels natural.

About which emotional intensity is considered appropriate in public.

About how much distance feels comfortable between speakers.

About how much silence a conversation can hold.

Try a small experiment.

Imagine telling the same story to a friend in two different settings.

First, sitting by a fireplace in a small wooden house during a snowy winter.

Then, on a sunlit square in a coastal city, surrounded by people and the cries of seagulls.

Most likely, your speech would change slightly. The tempo, volume, and intonation would shift. Even your gestures might become different.

The language itself remains the same.

But the way it is lived changes.

And here we arrive at another important idea.

Landscape may influence not only which sounds a language uses. It may also shape the atmosphere of communication, the rhythm of everyday life, and the cultural expectations surrounding human speech.

That is why, when we listen to different languages of the world, we do not always hear just a sequence of words.

We hear different ways of existing in space.

Somewhere, speech resembles a mountain path.

Somewhere, an endless steppe.

And somewhere else, the warm glow of a window in a long northern winter.

A Small Experiment for the Reader

Before you close this chapter, let’s do a small experiment.

Say the following Russian sentence “mama myla ramu” (“Mom was washing the frame”) out loud.

Now say it again, but this time almost without opening your teeth, barely moving your lips, as if you were standing in a cold wind and trying not to let any warmth escape your mouth.

Notice what happens.

The sound becomes tighter, more contained. Speech seems to turn inward. What changes is not only the sound itself, but the bodily experience of the sentence.

Now repeat the same words in a different way.

Open your mouth more fully on each vowel. Add more air, more space. Imagine speaking in a sunlit square where city noise does not prevent your voice from spreading freely around you.

This feels completely different.

The sentence is the same.

Only the way your body produces it has changed.

Of course, this experiment does not prove anything. It does not show how languages originated or why different peoples speak the way they do.

But it allows us to feel something important.

Speech is not only grammar and vocabulary.

Speech always lives in the body.

Every sound requires a specific configuration of tongue, lips, jaw, and breath. When we learn a foreign language, we are not only acquiring new words. We are learning a new way of using our own voice.

So next time you open a textbook of English, Arabic, Chinese, or any other language, try taking one more step.

Do not limit yourself to phonetic charts and transcription symbols.

Try to imagine the world in which that language exists.

What kinds of spaces surround its speakers?

What landscapes do they see every day?

What rhythm of life feels natural to them?

What distances do they cross regularly?

What sounds have accompanied them since childhood?

Of course, a language cannot be derived directly from geography. Mountains, steppes, and climate do not determine phonetics in any simple or linear way. But the surrounding world shapes human experience, and human experience inevitably becomes part of the culture in which language lives.

That is why learning a language is always something more than learning words.

It is an attempt to step, for a moment, outside your own worldview and see reality through another people’s eyes.

Perhaps then unfamiliar sounds will stop seeming like arbitrary rules.

And you will begin to hear in them not only speech.

But also the history of the people who, for centuries, learned to live in their corner of the world.

Because every language is not simply a way of describing reality.

It is a memory of how a human community has lived that reality.

Conclusions

We began this chapter by observing how differently human speech can sound across the world — in mountains, steppes, northern and southern spaces.

At first glance, language appears to be a fully autonomous system, shaped entirely within culture and history. Sounds, grammar, and vocabulary all seem to follow the internal logic of language itself.

And yet, as we moved through different landscapes, a different impression gradually emerged: that language has another layer of interaction with the world — the space in which it lives.

We saw how in mountainous regions speech often takes on sharper, more precise forms, as if it must cut through wind and echo. How in steppe environments sounds stretch and flow, following the logic of open horizons. How in northern and southern cultures it is not so much the language itself that changes, but the rhythm and density of communication — the emotional temperature of speech.

Of course, language is not a direct reflection of geography and does not obey climate as a law. But there is growing reason to believe that environment may indirectly shape speech habits — through the body, lived experience, and patterns of human interaction.

That is why language cannot be understood only as a system of rules and meanings.

It exists at the intersection between the world and human perception of the world.

It absorbs not only history and culture, but also the shapes of the spaces in which that history unfolded.

When we listen to different languages, we do not merely hear different sounds.

We hear different ways of being present in the world.