Name: Does the language you speak change how you think?
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T07:36:13.000Z
Duration: 5 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

In George Orwell's 1984, the government is trying to force Britain, or rather, Airstrip One, to use Newspeak, a constructed language that would end thought crime.

The goal, so the story goes, is to make it impossible to form ideas that could challenge the ruling party by taking away the words to think them with.

Transition words & phrases

Linguists often cringe when they hear people talk about the idea that the language you speak determines how you can think, because it's... well, it's not really a thing.

It's been called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, because it's associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, an early 20th century linguist, and his mentor Edward Sapir.

They weren't the first, the last, or the loudest linguists to ask the question, and they never wrote anything even close to a hypothesis about it together.

They wondered how language could impact thought and vice versa, but no more than that.

The concept is known as linguistic determinism in its strong form, and linguistic relativism in its weak form.

Determinism, the strong version, is a popular trope in fiction, particularly science fiction.

The film Arrival made it a major plot point and actually name-checked it.

If you immerse yourself into a foreign language, then you can actually rewire your brain.

The short story it's based on is much better.

Linguistic determinism is not taken very seriously by the linguistics community, as it's easily disprovable, either by attending a Philosophy 101 course, or just thinking about the phrase, I wish I could find the words to explain how I feel.

But the weak form, linguistic relativism, is much more broadly accepted.

It is a difficult and messy thing to test for and prove, though.

You can find a lot of people claiming that the Russian language has no word for privacy, because the concept of privacy isn't part of traditional Russian culture.

That might be true, I'm not Russian, couldn't tell you.

But that wouldn't be language limiting the way you think, that would be language reflecting the way you think.

There have been studies that show things like German speakers, whose language says that key is masculine, are more likely to describe a key as jagged, rough, and hard, whereas Spanish speakers, where key is feminine, would be more likely to use golden or intricate.

I've referred to that exact study here in the past, but since then, other researchers have tried to replicate it, and they didn't find the same result, which is something that keeps happening across psychology and other fields.

And besides, it's very difficult to tease apart the impacts of your culture and the impacts of your language.

Even if that result is true, which it's probably not, is the gendered language the cause or the effect?

There are some clear impacts on how different languages, not cultures, affect the brain.

For example, our hearing tunes into the phonology, the sounds of the languages we speak.

In Hindi, for example, tal and tal are two different words, platter and rhythm, because ta and tt are considered different sounds based on the aspiration, the air that comes out.

It's not passed down deliberately to children.

If you speak a language with that distinction, your brain will hear it automatically and unconsciously.

And if you don't, you have to try to actively listen for it.

That's a pretty clear way that languages impact thought.

But that doesn't feel close enough to the science fiction, does it?

It's not like it's changing your understanding of the world.

Science fiction wants the language you speak to affect the categories in your head, the way you understand the world, particularly for abstract concepts rather than actual physical things.

Emotions do get categorised in different ways by different humans all over the world.

In English, we can use the same word for two different feelings.

If someone says, I'm sad, do they mean crying in the corner?

Those are both sad, in the same way that the sky and ocean are both blue.

But if a child only knows the word sad, they've not heard of despondent, or listless, or morose, or ennui, well, the underlying emotions are still different.

They can still tell whether someone's grieving the devastating loss of their cartoonishly large lollipop, or whether they're just tired and generally down.

Having the different words is really helpful for expressing yourself, but they don't determine your ability to feel emotions.

And Ancient Greek had a lot of words for love.

In English, those are all basically translated as love with a lot of extra notes, but even though we only have one basic word to explain all those feelings and emotions, we still experience them, and we can communicate them without knowing Ancient Greek.

Until recently, English did not have a word for feeling joy at someone else's misfortune, but we still definitely experienced it before we borrowed Schadenfreude from German.

So the simple answer to the question is no, not really.

It might change how you listen to sounds, it might make some things easier to explain, but the idea that you can stop people bringing down the government by changing their language is, thankfully, just fiction.

And if you want even more linguistics, my co-author Gretchen McCulloch has a podcast called Lingthusiasm.

The link is on screen and in the description.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Does the language you speak change how you think?

rhythm

devastating

concept

ancient