We analyze the impact of language on risk-taking behavior of banks. Our hypothesis is that languages that grammatically distinguish between present and future events lead banks to take more risk. We investigate this hypothesis on a sample of 1,402 banks from 82 countries over the 2010-2017 period. We find that banks from countries with future tense marking take more risk in accordance with our prediction. This finding is robust to the inclusion of alternative culture indicators, to alternative definitions of bank risk and of future time reference.