Speak Your Way to Success (Or Failure): How Language Shapes Your Business Future

Let’s talk about something you probably never considered could impact your bottom line: the words coming out of your mouth, or rather, the grammatical structure of the language you speak. Forget jargon and buzzwords for a minute. Researchers have been digging into how the bones of your language influence your behavior, including how you handle money and make business decisions. And guess what? It turns out your native tongue might be making you save less, invest less, and even hinder your company’s innovation game.

The Time Travelers Among Us

Here’s the core idea: Languages differ in how they force you to think about time. Some languages, like German, let you talk about the future using the present tense. You can say, “Tomorrow it rains,” and everyone knows what you mean. These are called “weak-FTR” languages (i.e., weak future-time reference). English, on the other hand, is a “strong-FTR” language. If you’re predicting rain tomorrow, English grammar obliges you to use a future marker like “will” or “is going to”. You must grammatically separate the future from the present.

Researchers hypothesize this seemingly small difference might make the future feel more distant for speakers of strong-FTR languages. If the future feels far away, the rewards you get from saving or investing now might feel less valuable. Conversely, if your language treats the future and present more similarly, the future might feel closer, making you more willing to bear present costs for future gains.

The Wallet Impact

The evidence is stacking up. Speakers of weak-FTR languages are significantly more likely to have saved money in any given year. They also accumulate more wealth by the time they retire. It’s not just personal finances; countries where weak-FTR languages are dominant save a larger percentage of their GDP annually. This holds true even when accounting for factors like culture, values, institutions, and legal systems. It suggests language isn’t just a proxy for culture; it seems to have its own effect. Beyond money, weak-FTR speakers tend to smoke less, be more physically active, and are less likely to be obese.

Funding the Future

This linguistic time-travel effect even appears in the wild world of business funding, specifically crowdfunding. A recent study found that people from countries with weak-future languages participate more actively in crowdfunding ventures compared to those from strong-future language countries. They theorize that perceiving the future as closer gives it more psychological weight, encouraging future-oriented actions like investing in a startup. In a clever experiment, bilingual Chinese (weak-FTR) and English (strong-FTR) speakers, all from the same cultural background, were randomly shown the same crowdfunding pitch in either language. The results? Those who saw the pitch in Chinese were more likely to invest. Language alone, separate from culture, made a difference.

Guarding Your Ideas

And if you’re running a company, particularly one that relies on innovation, your language might be hurting your ability to protect your intellectual property. Research looking at large automotive suppliers found that firms from predominantly strong-FTR language countries sought fewer patents (Lim et al., 2021). Patents, after all, are all about securing future value from an innovation. If your language makes the future feel distant, you might discount that future value and therefore patent less.

They also looked at how a firm’s international expansion (Degree of Internationalization or DOI) relates to its innovation performance (patents). While there’s often a U-shaped relationship (low DOI initially correlates with fewer patents, then increases at higher DOI), this U-shape only showed up for firms from predominantly weak-FTR language countries. For strong-FTR firms, that clear relationship disappeared. It suggests that the way your language handles time might be a critical factor, not just a minor influence.

So What’s a Boss to Do?

If you hail from a strong-FTR land (like the US or the UK), your language habits might be contributing to a form of organizational “short-termism” when it comes to things like innovation and investment. Researchers suggest you can counteract this built-in temporal discounting. Put systems and processes in place that explicitly require teams to assess the long-term future value of ideas, investments, and innovations. Force the connection between the present cost and the future reward.

In essence, while you might not change your language, understanding its subtle, potentially powerful impact on how you and your employees perceive and value the future is crucial. Mind your language, because it might just be minding your wallet and your company’s long-term success.

Sources:

Chen, M. K. (2013). The effect of language on economic behavior: Evidence from savings rates, health behaviors, and retirement assets. American Economic Review, 103(2), 690-731. DOI: 10.1257/aer.103.2.690

Di Pietro, Francesca, et al. “Closeness of the future: Influence of language future-time reference on individual behaviour.” Journal of Business Venturing Insights 19 (2023): e00359. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbvi.2022.e00359

Lim, E., & Powell, K. S. (2022). Language and discounting future value: language as a moderator of internationalization–innovation performance relationships. Management Decision, 60(1), 48-65. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-07-2020-0863