A thought on that--If what you're saying is true, then basically now he's telling us that Asian-Americans who never learned their native language will not be as "smart" as their Asia-residing counterparts?
Culture has a lot to do with language. But not always. A culture can survive a language change intact.
His chapter on the Scots-Irish clan-feuding transplanted to the Kentucky Hills is one. My DW and I laughed all the way through that chapter since that is my heritage and its on display whenever we visit my dad's side of the family. There is no Gaelic spoken in the hills of that area, and Culloden was over 250 years ago, but there are a lot of Scottish flags flying in that area to this day!!
There is more to culture than language - but language can make some things easier.
Gladwell does dwell on the Chinese numbering nouns, indicating they are easier to grasp and say than the English equivalent, allowing Chinese speaking kids to move ahead more quickly. I have to agree. The English counting nouns like eleven and twelve are bizarre - in English we have squished three different numbering concepts together and three different bases and three languages withing from 0 to 20. And then there is our system of weights and measures!!!
And language can retard certain concepts because that language does not have a deep diffusion of key ideas.
For instance, China never discovered, codified, and popularized Logic like the Greeks did. And the political legacy of the strong central state control over education and ideas meant that theoretical knowledge was never developed to the great degree in the West. In fact, theoretical knowledge was frowned upon.
The West was able to advance and surpass China and Japan due to advances in science brought on by theoretical studies which were encouraged by the Greek and Jewish cultures and later adopted by the Romans, Christians, early Muslims and then Western Europeans. The Greek cultural legacy permeates Western culture very, very deeply - and no one speaks Aeolian Greek today!
A cultural legacy he does not mention in his book, but which has been extensively studied, are the Sensei/Nisei - most of which founded and ran truck farms in California. The immigrant Japanese who formed the Sensei were carefully chosen by the Meiji to come to the US. IIRC, they and the Neisei did very well, but their offspring reverted to the mean as they moved away from their cultural roots.
