This and that: Languages around the world use the same words for spatial distinction, find University of East Anglia researchers

Languages across the world have words for “this” and “that” a new study states after researchers studied more than 1,000 speakers of 29 different languages to see how they use demonstratives – words showing where something is in relation to a person talking, such as “this cat” or “that dog”.

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) found all of the languages tested have the same spatial distinctions using 'this' or 'that' based on whether the objects being spoken about can be reached.

Previously, it had been thought languages vary in the spatial distinctions they make, meaning people may think in fundamentally different ways. Lead researcher Professor Kenny Coventry, from UEA’s School of Psychology, said: “There are over 7,000 diverse languages spoken across the world. We wanted to find out how speakers of a wide range of languages use the oldest recorded words in all of language – spatial demonstratives, such as ‘this’ or ‘that’.”

The researchers studied 29 languages from around the world including English, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, Mandarin, Tzeltal and Telugu and more than 1,000 speakers were tested to see how demonstratives were used in their language to describe where objects were.

Prof Coventry said: “We found that in all the languages we tested, there is a word for objects that are within reach of the speaker, like ‘this’ in English, and a word for objects out of reach – ‘that’. This distinction may explain the early evolutionary origin of demonstratives as linguistic forms.”

The research, published in Nature Human Behaviour, was led by UEA in collaboration with researchers at 32 other international institutions including Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Germany, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Aarhus University, Denmark and the University of Buffalo, USA.