The first question to be answered, is what exactly is our perception of time? According to Ernst Pöppel (Pöppel, 1978) there are several aspects of our perception and experience of time. Among these we have the experience of (1) duration; (2) non-simultaneity; (3) order; (4) past and present; and (5) change. I will not dive into all of these aspects I will focus on duration, past and present for I believe that these two things are fundamental in how language can affect your perception of time. You might think that the perception of order is nearly the same as identifying past and present. There are certain links between these two, but to ask whether the experience of tense (experiencing an event as past or present) is more fundamental than the experience of order or the other way around is bound to cause friction in a discussion about the perception of time. We can distinguish some of these elements individually from another, others are harder to determine due to indistinct differences as argued above. 

One such argument for duration is that, when we are looking at the specific duration of an event, such an event could be described as either long or short; but what is it that is being defined as long or short? When we recall an event, and make a statement about its duration, what we are not merely measuring the length of an event but are judging the duration of our memory of said event (Le Poidevin, 2019). This thought experiment on the duration of time, was first coined by St. Augustine of Hippo in his book Confessions. He argues that that what is past, cannot be, since it has ceased to be. And that wat is non-existent cannot presently have properties such as being long. Neither can it be what is present, for the present has no duration. This beautifully describes our uncertainty on this topic, and maybe explains us why these questions have kept so many intelligent people pondering for answers. In any case, while an event is still going on, its duration cannot be assessed.

Another term which appears to be related to the perception of duration, past and present is “specious present”. Which was introduced by psychologists E.R. Clay and later characterized by William James. In his book the principles of psychology he defines specious present as follows: ‘the prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible. We are constantly aware of a certain duration, the specious present, varying from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and another part later) is the original intuition of time.’ (James, 1890). Le Poidevin goes on to define the specious present in four pointers, (1) the span of short-term memory; (2) the duration which is perceived, not as duration, but as instantaneous; (3) the duration which is directly perceived; (4) the duration which is perceived both as present and as extended in time. Poidevin explains to us with several simple examples of blurring movement and constructed language, that the specious present may not be the most ideal tool to explain temporal experience, but it does help to formulate some kind of idea about what past and present may be. 

The way our brain processes information has a lot to do with how and why we perceive an event as present or past. The time it takes for information to travel from point A to B has a delay, there is a certain, although minute, amount of time that it takes a brain to formulate a sentence; utter the sentence and consecutively for another brain to receive and translate that information into comprehensible thought. If looked at very strictly from this angle, all that we perceive is in fact past, but not all that is past, has occurred only mere microseconds ago. However, this in and of itself, does not tell us what it is to perceive things as present or past. The constant changing nature of our present is not reflected in that idea, the passage of time is the most interesting feature of present, and any explanation of our perception of time must account for this experience. 

So, how is it then, that our greatest philosophical minds with all their intellectual prowess are still looking for answers to the specifics of the question what is the perception of time? Unfortunately, there is not one definite answer to this question, our current knowledge of the human brain, time as a spatial and temporal dimension and how time is accurately perceived by humans is, as of yet incomplete. Thankfully, over the past three decades or so, meta-physicists, linguists and philosophers have made great progress on the relative topics of their profession regarding the perception of time. 

How then, does our perception of time, correlate to our language use? What is it in our language that is explicably tied to our perception of time? On our planet there are around 7000 spoken languages, most of these languages have some conceptualization of time and its passage. However, not all of them do. These concepts can be seen in more obvious words such as before, after, during etc. A less obvious example of concepts of perception of time can be found in grammar structures, lets look at the following sentence: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall”. In English we would have to mark the verb for tense and say ‘sat’ instead of ‘sit’. However, in Indonesian you don’t need to and you can’t mark a verb for tense. In Russian, the verb you would use would reveal the gender of your protagonist. So, the verb would be slightly different, if it was Mr. Dumpty instead of Mrs. Dumpty doing the sitting. These examples show us, that in many different languages there are several ways of expressing the same action or event. For some languages, the information contained in the sentence would become more specific, such as including how the observer came upon the information like they would do in Turkish. Telling the listener, how the observer knows this to be true. Did he or she read about it or observe it with their own eyes? Does this all mean that there is a difference in the perception of time, or merely a difference in how we explain time? An experiment conducted by Lancaster University in 2017 gives us a definite answer. 

Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist from Lancaster University and Professor Emanuel Bylund, a linguist from Stellenbosch University and Stockholm University, have discovered that bilingual people (those who speak two languages or more) think about time differently (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2017). Depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. The study compared speakers of both Spanish and Swedish, Swedish and English speakers prefer to mark the duration of events by referring to physical distances, (e.g. a short break, a long wedding, etc.). The passage of time is perceived as distance travelled. In contradiction to Greek and Spanish speakers, they tend to mark time passage by referring to physical quantities (e.g. a small break, a big wedding). Their passage of time is perceived as growing volume. In the study, they asked Spanish-Swedish bilinguals to estimate how much time had passed while watching either a line growing across a screen or a container being filled. 

In the duration of this time, the participants were prompted on screen with either the word ‘‘duración’ (the Spanish word for duration) or ‘tid’ (the Swedish word for duration). The results were clear, when confronted with the Spanish word for duration, participants based their time estimates on how full the containers were, perceiving time as volume. They were unaffected by the lines growing on screens. Conversely, when the Swedish prompt word was shown, their behavior in turn, switched. With their time estimates becoming influenced by the distance the lines had travelled, but not by how much the containers had filled.

In conclusion, not only does language alter our perception and expression of the passage of time. Bilinguals seem to flexibly utilize both ways of marking duration, depending on the context. Altering how they experience the passage of time. Different languages also represent different worldviews, different ways of organizing the world around us in logical order to make sense of it all. Does that mean, that when we learn a new language, we gain a ‘tool’ if you will, that helps us make sense of the world in another view? Athanasopoulos said the following: “By learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren’t aware of before. The fact that bilinguals go between these different ways of estimating time effortlessly and unconsciously fits in with a growing body of evidence demonstrating the ease with which language can creep into our most basic senses, including our emotions, our visual perception, and now it turns out, our sense of time.” (Athanasopoulos & Bylund, 2017).

These experiments show us that not only does language correlate to the perception of time, it also alters it. Now there is no real way to determine if one perception is more accurate than another, but there are several more ways where time influences our perception of time. 

At the start of this document, I briefly mentioned the perception of motion and distance. Where Poidevin explains to us with several simple examples of blurring movement how the theory posed by William James was not the ideal tool explain temporal experience. The example given by Poidevin, was the blurring of an object if it passes in front of your eyes at great speeds, the motion and speed of the object become blurred to our vision. Time can only be explained for humans in three dimensions, for those are all the dimensions we can perceive. Up, down, left and right, the main three axes (X, Y, Z). We already saw a slight difference in the perception of these dimensions concerning time with the experiment on Mandarin and English speakers, another demonstration of difference in spatial representations of time can be found in Australia. In Pormpuraaw, Queensland Australia, lives an aboriginal community of the same name. Their language (Kuuk Thaayore) does not routinely use relative special terms such as in English, like left and right. Instead they rely on cardinal directions (North, East, South, West). They would say things like “the boy standing to the South of Mary is my brother”. Members of these communities must always stay oriented, just to be able to speak properly. In their language, to say hello you would say “where are you going?” with an appropriate response being “a long way south”. If you do not know which way is which, you literally cannot get past hello. To discover how members of these linguistic communities think about time, Boroditsky gave participants sets of pictures depicting temporal progression (e.g. a man aging, a growing crocodile or a banana being eaten). The question was to arrange the photos to show the correct temporal order (Boroditsky, 2011). As we had established before, English speakers tend to arrange time from left to right, Hebrew and Muslims from right to left, Chinese from top to bottom, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. The people of the Kuuk Thaayore community did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left. Nor did they more toward or away from the body. However, their arrangements were not random at all, there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. They arranged the photos according to cardinal direction, from east to west. When seated facing south, the cards went from left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When faced east, the cards came toward the body, and so forth. The Kuuk Thaayore were naturally aware of their positioning, using their spatial orientation to alter their representation of time. 

This example shows us that both language and culture influence how we think about time, and that it alters our perspectives of it.