Does the language you speak affect how you think?
Anyone who’s tried to learn a new language, whether in a high school Spanish class or on a summer trip to Bali, has likely encountered significant differences from their native language. While in English there’s only one general word for ‘blue,’ with additional distinctions made through modifiers like ‘light’ or ‘dark,’ Russian lacks a general word for ‘blue,’ instead separating them into the light-blue ‘goluboy’ or dark-blue ‘siniyy.’ Similarly, while in English there’s only one general word for ‘you,’ Indonesian has countless pronouns depending on formality, gender, and dialect including but not limited to anta, antum, coen, ente, kamu, ko, kowe, kon, koen, lu, lo, loe, elu, mika, mike, mas, mbak, kakak, anda, saudara, saudari, bapak, ibu, sampeyan, and panjengan…
Given that languages evidently differ from each other so much and that language is used by humans to describe how they perceive the world, early 19th-century linguists like Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed the principle of linguistic relativity, which states that the language an individual speaks affects the way they think about the world, By this hypothesis, individuals who speak Russian perceive hues of blue differently than English speakers, which researchers tested in 2007 with Russian and English speakers to see which group was better able to distinguish light and dark shades of blue. As expected, Russian speakers were able to discriminate between lighter blues and darker blues faster than English speakers, a difference that was most noticeable between closer shades of blue.
While color terminology seems to be a strong example of linguistic relativity, indicating that the language one speaks is interrelated with their perception of the world, there also exist linguistic universals that indicate the opposite—how humans think affect how they perceive the world. Linguistic universals are features that are either present across all the world’s languages (absolute) or always present given a certain condition (implicational). An example of an absolute universal is the existence of pronouns and verbs in every natural human language, while an implicational universal would be that if a language has a dual number (two items), it also has a plural number (three or more items, like -s in English).
Based on these linguistic universals, Noam Chomsky, often dubbed the ‘father of modern linguistics,’ developed what is now called the innateness hypothesis—which states that humans are born with an innate understanding of linguistic structure that they apply to language during a critical period of language development (birth to puberty). This observation has been supported by a new universalist view of color categorization, which posits that color categories across languages—including Russian and English—evolve and recur from exactly 2-11 categories in a partially fixed order.
So, what’s the verdict? Does the language you speak affect how you think? Or is it the other way around? As illustrated above, the answer is a little bit of both.