Does Language Shape Thought?

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.

- Benjamin Whorf

As a linguistics student, I was (and still am) especially interested in the cognitive side of language. Cognition, culture, and language are deeply intertwined. Different cultures use different languages to represent the same basic ideas yet in varying ways. For instance, English speakers would say that they “make” or “earn” money when they discuss their job, whereas a Spanish speaker would say that they “win” money (ganar dinero). Could this language difference manifest itself in the personalities of these different speakers? Does the language we speak influence our thoughts and, subsequently, our behavior?

This hypothesis is known as the Whorfian or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (AKA linguistic determinism, linguistic relativity). Introduced by a linguistic anthropologist named Benjamin Whorf, this hypothesis states, in a nutshell, that language shapes thought, and not the other way around. 

   Edward Sapir            Benjamin Whorf

We can see this with things like euphemisms, which are used to desensitize the way we feel about certain, sometimes taboo, topics. Instead of “alcohol”, it’s “adult beverages”. Instead of “died”, it’s “passed away”. The late great George Carlin has a set about this very topic. We see it too in George Orwell’s famous book, 1984, which details how governments can control the ideas of people by controlling the language they are allowed to use. 

Now, of course, not all thought is done using language. If someone were to ask you directions to the closest gas station, you would probably picture streets and landmarks in your head instead of a written set of directions. So, humans do also have the capacity for non-linguistic manners of thought in addition to linguistic ones.

Observations of language differences led to the idea that these variations in language would cause variations in thought. Edward Sapir, who worked with Whorf, said, “We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation”. Whorf has been quoted as saying something quite similar: “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages”.

There were empirical tests done in the ‘60s and ‘70s that focused mostly on the effects of color lexicon on perception and memory for color. It seemed perfect since the color spectrum is the same all over the world, but color terms vary. Some languages, like English, divide the colors into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, while others languages, like the African language Bassa, might only have two color terms, one for red-orange-yellow and another for green-blue-violet. 

Of course, the name of the color does not change the perception of the color to the speaker because color perception is a function of how the eye works and is not influenced by language. This result caused this hypothesis to lose credibility until recently, when scientists decided to retest this hypothesis which yielded some surprising results.

In Korean, verbs are more salient throughout the language than English, and children that acquire Korean seem to acquire verbs earlier than those acquiring English. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would suggest that children acquiring Korean would also acquire the concepts encoded by verbs earlier than those acquiring English. Some evidence does support this claim. While Korean-speaking children acquired the concept of means/ends relations (which is encoded by verbs) earlier than the English-speaking ones, in contrast, the English-speaking children had larger vocabularies and had a better understanding of object categorization (A. Gopnik & Choi, 1990).

Many languages have gender systems which dictate that all nouns belong to one category or another, and that this category determines many things such as which article to use, etc. Some languages have two -- masculine and feminine. Some languages, like German, have three -- masculine, feminine, and neuter. The gender of the majority of nouns is attributed arbitrarily, meaning there is no rhyme or reason to why something would be classified as “masculine” or “feminine”. For example, in Spanish, the moon is feminine (“la luna”) and in German, the moon is masculine (“der Mond”). Therefore, according to the Whorfian hypothesis, German speakers should think of the moon in more masculine terms and Spanish speakers should think of the moon as more feminine.

This was actually tested and the hypothesis was supported. German and Spanish speakers who could also speak English were given a list of nouns that had opposite genders in each language but were written in English to hide the gender. German speakers described a key (“der Schlussel”) as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while Spanish speakers described a key (“la llave”) as intricate, little, shiny, and lovely (Boroditsky et al., 2003).

The hypothesis was tested another time in reference to spatial relations in language and thought. The hypothesis predicted that people who speak an absolute coordinate system such as cardinal directions should have a better sense of where they are with respect to absolute coordinates than would speakers of a relative frame of reference language (behind the desk, to the left of the barn). However, according to P. Li and Gleitman (2002), they found that English speakers (relative frame of reference language) could be induced to use absolute coordinate systems by manipulating the environment (inside vs. outside).

As one can see, this hypothesis is just that; a hypothesis. It is an imperfect hypothesis, albeit an interesting one. I do think that learning another language gives you another way to perceive the world. Today, I learned in my German lesson that the word “Seite” means “page” like in a book and also “side” like a different side of someone’s personality. I think that is too cool and an interesting way to view people and their differing personalities within themselves. Or how about in Spanish, the way they say “to give birth” is “dar a luz”, which literally translates to “to bring to light”?! 

ANYWAY, that is probably WAY more than you ever wanted to know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. 

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