Language and Emotional Intelligence

Achieving social resilience through improving local capacities in emotional intelligence for individuals and well as communities has been the focus of many initiatives for the millennial area. Emotional intelligence is about having the ability to be aware of your own emotions, and having the capacity to control, and express them, and to handle human interaction empathetically and judiciously. Most of the work done in that field has an international structure, where the general assumption is that the training material used for emotional intelligence is applied to all humans similarly. In some cases, and to make the training material more applicable, some take into consideration the cultural differences; however, the language itself, not the translation, is rarely considered.

It is fairly understood how cultures develop a richer vocabulary for objects their people care about the most; In the Eskimo, for example, there are almost 50 words used for the word ‘snow’, and in Arabic there are hundreds of words for ‘camel’. But how can some languages give an advantage of their speakers over others when it comes to emotional intelligence? Let’s take one of the Middle Eastern languages that have been around for a couple thousand years; Arabic. The Arabic language is a philosophical language based on sound Third-Root system, where any word has to be developed from a third-root; an abstracted word of three letters.

In the Middle East in particular, and in eastern cultures in general, physical relationships outside marriages are not acceptable to a high extent, which motivated people to develop the non-physical side of relationships or love in more depth and with greater detail. In the Arabic language, there are 11 words for love, describing different stages of the (falling in love) process. For example, the word 'hawa' describes the inclining of the soul and mind towards someone, where 'hawa' comes from the root ‘h-w-a’ – which is a transient wind rising and falling.

Interestingly, 'hubb' is another word for love that has the same third root of the word ‘seed’, which gives it an additional meaning; if you take good care of it, it will grow. 'Alaaqa', coming from the third root (‘a-l-q) which means ‘to cling-on to’ describing the following stage of love; when the heart gets attached to the beloved one, before growing and evolving into the next stage, which is the blind desire 'ishq', followed by 'shaghaf', all the way to 'huyum', which describes a complete loss of logic and reason.

‘Qalb’ is an Arabic word for heart, and it has a third root of (q-l-b), which means turning something over, referring to the fact that our hearts and feelings are constantly changing. Additionally, the word for human, ‘Ensan’ comes from the third root of ‘n-s-y’, which means to forget, referring to the need of humans to forgetting and letting go to be able to live their lives.

In many languages, ‘being in love’ is treated as a ‘Yes/No’ question; it is like choosing between black and white, and that also can be seen in English speaking countries, where we see some people saying things like 'I love him, but I don’t love him love him!', as they are not able to identify how they really feel about someone. If the different stages of falling in love existed in all languages, to what extent would it help us as humans to express how we really feel, and based on that take important decisions in our life, like marriage proposals.

Not having a term in your language for a certain feeling may be the reason that you are unable to recognize that feeling. For example, your feeling while you touch sunlight when walking between trees, you can describe that as clarity, warmth, or peace, but all of these are approximate feelings, because there is no specific word to describe that in English; however, in Japanese there is ‘Komorebi’.

When it comes to emotional intelligence, your language by itself shapes the way you think and feel, and can put you head and shoulders above others just for its pure nature by creating a strong emotional infrastructure, or can limit you in many different ways and be the reason why your emotional intelligence is not developed as it should be!