Does the language you speak change how you think?

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. 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.

Which is where it belongs! The film Arrival made it a major plot point and actually name-checked it. "If you immerse yourself into a foreign language, that you "can actually rewire your brain?

" "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. " "Hmm. " 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, I 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 when other researchers tried to replicate that study, 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, [tʰal] and [tal] are two different words, platter and rhythm, because [tʰ] and [t] are considered different sounds, based on the aspiration, that air that comes out. That's not a cultural value, that's not ideology, it's not passed down deliberately to children.

That's just language. 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. So what about emotions? Emotions do get categorized 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" or "depressed, tired, and staying in bed"? Those are both sad in the same way that the sky and the ocean are both blue.

But even 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.

It just takes a few more words. 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.