Does the language we speak affect the way we think?

By Madeleine Higgins

There are thousands of languages spoken in the world. The exact number itself is unclear; people often disagree on the differences between dialects and languages. For instance, some Romance languages that we would consider distinct, like Spanish and Italian, are actually more similar than what we would consider different dialects of a diverse language like Mandarin. Regardless, there are many, many languages. And anyone who has experience with more than one tongue knows on some level that different languages aren’t just exact copies of each other with one-to-one translations of every word. No—there are vast differences in structure, grammar, and use. Not every word has an exact translation in another language that carries its exact meaning and connotations. Those differences become especially pronounced the more accurate you want your translation to be. 

This issue has raised a question to many: does the language you speak affect the way you think? In other words, our very perception of the world is “relative” to the language we use to describe it. Also called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis for its originators, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, linguistic relativity has been a hotly debated topic for hundreds of years, drawing thinkers from fields as varied as linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, and anthropology. 

Part of the reason why it’s so controversial is that there are different extents to which one can argue for or against the theory. There is now clear research proving that the language spoken by a group has some measurable impact on their cognitive processes. One of the most common ways people hear of linguistic relativity is through linguist Lera Boroditsky’s TED Talk, “How language shapes the way we think”, where she raises many convincing examples in favor of this hypothesis. For instance, since the Russian language has different words for “light blue” and “dark blue”, experiments have shown that Russian speakers are more apt at discerning slightly different shades of blue than English speakers. Speakers of the Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre language have no words for “left”, “right”, “in front”, or “behind”, and instead use North, South, East, and West to describe anything related to direction. If you were saying that your right arm is broken, depending on which way you were facing, you may say your “Northeast” arm is broken or your “South-South-West” arm. Thus, people who grow up speaking Kuuk Thaayorre have incredible internal compasses—much better than outsiders thought possible.

But do these examples really prove linguistic relativity in its entirety? After reading some of the more extreme opinions of the original theorists, I would argue that they don’t. Here’s some text from Sapir’s 1929 paper:

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society … Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose. …We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.”

Sapir seems to be arguing not only that the language you speak affects your ability to discern shades of blue or know your true North, but also that our entire perception of the world is shaped by the language we use to describe it. In other words, it is our expression of reality that shapes our perception of reality, not the other way around. 

Another issue arises when people find “proof” that the language you speak affects the way you think; language, culture, and environment are so tangled up in each other that discerning cause and effect can become incredibly difficult. Language is created out of necessity to describe our lived experiences, which are often deeply shaped by our environments and culture. The trouble is, culture and environment also has an impact on our cognitive processes, which “linguistic relativity” might just be a natural symptom of.

Here’s an example: the languages spoken by Pacific islanders have tons of words to describe fish; much more, obviously, than societies which aren’t historically dependent on them for food. Pacific islanders, historically, are also much better at distinguishing fish species and understanding fish anatomy. If a researcher was looking at this phenomenon strictly through a “linguistic relativity” standpoint, they may state that Pacific islanders have many words to describe fish, and therefore, their cognitive processes have been affected to make them better at distinguishing and understanding them. But there’s no real evidence here at all that the language they’re speaking is what is actually causing them to think differently.

Some of Sapir’s and Whorf’s most extreme statements, like their assertion that a person’s mother tongue can actually restrict what they are able to understand, have largely been taken as untrue. For instance, in German, the word “pantoffelheld”, meaning “a man who is confident in front of his friends but can’t stand up to his wife”, has no one-to-one translation in English, yet that doesn’t mean English speakers don’t understand the concept that the word describes. 

Linguistic relativity, to the extent which Sapir and Whorf believed in it, has not been proven or disproven entirely. The question of its existence gets at the most perplexing questions of our humanity, about the difference between perception and reality and the very nature of consciousness. Nevertheless, the topic has been fascinating for me (and others) to research and write about, and I’ll keep this blog updated with anything new I discover about it.