Does language change the way we think?

To me, the world around us feels immutable. I will take a walk down a suburban street, and maybe see two yellow dogs playing on the front lawn of someone’s house. Everyone onlooking might see more or less the same thing, but as it turns out, the way we describe the event can vary greatly based on the language we speak.

So our description of the world can change based on the language we speak. This much is obvious - we’re speaking an entirely different language! The pressing question to me, though, is whether the act of describing something differently changes our experience? Linguistic relativism postulates just that: the language that people speak directly affects the way they think and view the world.

This idea has been championed by one of the harbingers of modern linguistics in the United States, Edward Sapir: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”¹ Sapir’s argument, which later formed into linguistic relativism, is that we do not just have different ways of describing the world, our ways of describing the world actually change how we perceive it.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure how people perceive the world. We can just guess at it with science and culture. We’re going to look into some of the more interesting divergences in language and talk about how they might affect one’s worldview. We’ll start with color.

As a quick disclaimer, I am only fluent in English. I have studied French, Latin, and Japanese in school, and every other language I bring up is just from reading online and trying to understand. I apologize for any mistakes or misrepresentations.

Related is the idea of the inverted spectrum: two people could see a color they both describe as red, and yet what color they actually see is different for different people. This idea has always interested me in that it’s possible that everyone has exactly the same favorite color, but that color is assigned different names. We were taught from a young age to associate what we see with specific names, but there’s no guarantee that what I see as a certain color is the same color you see. As an example, my favorite color is blue. Now imagine your favorite color. Our language has a name for that color. We have no way of knowing whether when you picture your favorite color, you’re not seeing the same hue of what I know as blue when I think of my own favorite color.

Color is an interesting way to look at the relationship between language and worldview. Color is a continuum - in that what we perceive as color is different wavelengths of light - but we categorize colors discretely based on what language we speak.

English has 11 basic terms for colors: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, pink, gray, brown, orange, and purple. Despite not knowing where these colors fall on the light spectrum, or even knowing their relationship to each other, humans can identify these colors correctly with ease (with the exception, of course, of those who are colorblind).

As an aside, pink is a very interesting color, since it is a mixture of red and purple light - colors on the opposite side of the visible spectrum. This has led to people saying that pink doesn’t exist. Most famously, perhaps, is Robert Krulwich on NPR. The argument is that pink doesn’t appear in a rainbow - it’s a combination of colors that don’t exist. Of course, this is ignoring that colors don’t really ‘exist’ at all - they’re merely our eyes and brains constructing some meaning in the world. Other animals can see other parts of the light spectrum: snakes and mosquitos can see in infrared, while cats and dogs can see in ultraviolet light. These animals are seeing things, possibly with some ‘color’ associated with them, whereas humans would just see darkness.

Back to language. While English has 11 color terms, the Russian language has 12, with two forms of what English speakers think of as the color blue. This distinction in language comes with some advantages: Russian speakers are better able to identify different forms of blue than their English-speaking counterparts. Another contrast is the Dani people in Western New Guinea. The Dani languages differentiate only two basic colors, mili for cool/dark shades such as blue, green, and black, and mola for warm/light colors such as red, yellow, and white. However, this does not seem to harm their ability to see colors. Despite having only two words for colors, the Dani people’s ability to remember colors in tests is very similar to English speakers’ abilities.

These examples are frustratingly unclear as to how language can indicate worldview. On one hand, Russian speakers indicate that language changes the way one perceives colors. On the other hand, the Dani indicate that they have no difficulty perceiving color, despite not using words to describe those colors. Finally, this paper indicates that language has a presence in color perception. Language regions in the brain fire up when identifying colors, suggesting that language has at least some part in color recognition.

So let’s take a look at the influence of language outside of color.

Guugu Yimithirr, a language spoken in Australia, doesn’t have words for left and right. Instead, they use cardinal directions to describe locations. Instead of saying “That dog is in front of the house”, they would say: “That dog is south of the house.” This, in turn, leads them to better know cardinal directions, which makes sense given their increased time spent practicing. The implication, though, is that these people’s spatial memory could operate in absolute instead of relative terms.

Grammar can take language in a different direction, incorporating concepts into our everyday speech. Genderization of language is a common example of this. Languages have male and female forms for words. In French, for example, one would say “la chaise”, or in English equivalent, “That (female) chair”. Of course, the connection is not 1:1, since we don’t have gendered language in English. It would be odd for an English speaker to say “That female chair” because it’s specifically drawing attention to an attribute that a chair doesn’t have, at least in our language.

Another example of languages adding meaning to speech is counting in Japanese. There are around 500 counters in Japanese, although not all of them are used very commonly. Counters are used to specify the type of object being counted. Instead of a word for “two”, there are words that mean “two people”, “two small animals” or “two foot-related items”.

Time is another aspect in which languages diverge. English is tripartite, meaning that we have 3 tenses to conjugate: past, present, and future. “I walked”, “I walk”, “I will walk”. In Mandarin, in contrast, there are no conjugated tenses. Of course, this does not mean that there is constant confusion about the timing of events, but rather that the constant reminding of time throughout a sentence is not necessary.

The problem with all of this comes back to the philosophical question of the inverted spectrum. Without being able to truly inhabit the mind of another, it’s impossible to say whether language influences the way that one experiences the world - if colors are different, if items look more categorized, or if locations seem more absolute. All we can really say is that language gives us a different framework for the world we do see and a different way of interpreting it.

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