Linguistic similarity even helped distinguish between employees who stayed at the firm and those who left to pursue better options. Not because they got fired, but because they were offered something better elsewhere. These folks assimilated early on, but at some point, their language started to diverge. While clearly capable of adapting, eventually they stopped trying, foreshadowing their intention to quit.

The British linguist J. R. Firth once noted, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” Said another way, you can learn a lot about what words mean and the relationships among them by looking at the contexts they show up in and the words that surround them.

Because beyond telling us things about specific people, language also reveals things about society more broadly. The biases and beliefs that shape how we see the world.

In language we build our own identities, our relationships with others, the countries that we live in, the companies we have, and the values that we hold dear. With language we generate life. Without language we are mostly chimpanzees.’ - Fernando Flores

As I’ve said, communication in language between two people is communication between two biological beings who literally live in different cognitive universes.