Does the language you speak change how you think?

0:00 In George Orwell's 1984, the government is trying to force Britain, or rather,

0:05 "Airstrip One", to use Newspeak:

0:07 a constructed language that would end "thought-crime".

0:09 The goal, so the story goes,

0:11 is to make it impossible to form ideas that could challenge

0:14 the ruling Party by taking away the words to think them with.

0:19 Linguists often cringe when they hear people talk about the idea

0:23 that the language you speak determines how you can think.

0:25 Because it's… well, it's not really a thing.

0:29 It's been called the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis",

0:32 because it's associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf,

0:34 an early 20th century linguist, and his mentor, Edward Sapir.

0:37 They weren't the first, the last, or the loudest linguists to ask the question,

0:42 and they never wrote anything even close to a hypothesis about it together.

0:46 They wondered how language could impact thought,

0:49 and vice versa, but no more than that.

0:51 The concept is known as linguistic determinism in its strong form,

0:55 and linguistic relativism in its weak form.

0:57 Determinism, the "strong" version,

0:59 is a popular trope in fiction, particularly science fiction.

1:04 Which is where it belongs!

1:05 The film Arrival made it a major plot point and actually name-checked it.

1:09 "If you immerse yourself into a foreign language,

1:11 that you "can actually rewire your brain?" "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis."

1:16 "Hmm." The short story it's based on is much better.

1:20 Linguistic determinism is not taken very seriously by the linguistics community,

1:25 as it's easily disprovable.

1:26 Either by attending a Philosophy 101 course, or just thinking about the phrase,

1:30 "I wish I could find the words to explain how I feel." But the weak form,

1:36 linguistic relativism, is much more broadly accepted.

1:38 It is a difficult and messy thing to test for and prove, though.

1:42 You can find a lot of people claiming

1:44 that the Russian language has no word for "privacy",

1:46 because the concept of 'privacy' isn't part of traditional Russian culture?

1:49 That might be true, I'm not Russian, I couldn't tell you,

1:52 but that wouldn't be language limiting the way you think,

1:55 that would be language reflecting the way you think.

1:58 There have been studies that show things like: German speakers,

2:02 whose language says that 'key' is 'masculine',

2:04 are more likely to describe a key as 'jagged',

2:07 'rough', and 'hard', whereas Spanish speakers, where 'key' is 'feminine',

2:10 would be more likely to use 'golden' or 'intricate'.

2:13 I've referred to that exact study here in the past.

2:16 But when other researchers tried to replicate that study,

2:19 they didn't find the same result,

2:21 which is something that keeps happening across psychology and other fields.

2:25 And besides, it's very difficult to tease apart the impacts

2:28 of your culture and the impacts of your language.

2:30 Even if that result is true,

2:32 which it's probably not… is the gendered language the cause, or the effect?

2:38 There are some clear impacts on how different languages,

2:41 not cultures, affect the brain.

2:43 For example, our hearing tunes into the phonology,

2:45 the sounds, of the languages we speak.

2:47 In Hindi, for example,

2:48 [tʰal] and [tal] are two different words, platter and rhythm,

2:52 because [tʰ] and [t] are considered different sounds,

2:55 based on the aspiration, that air that comes out.

2:58 That's not a cultural value, that's not ideology,

3:01 it's not passed down deliberately to children.

3:04 That's just language.

3:05 If you speak a language with that distinction,

3:07 your brain will hear it automatically and unconsciously.

3:10 And if you don't, you have to try to actively listen for it.

3:13 That's a pretty clear way that languages impact thought.

3:16 But that doesn't feel close enough to the science fiction, does it?

3:19 It's not like it's changing your understanding of the world.

3:23 Science fiction wants the language you speak

3:25 to affect the categories in your head, the way you understand the world,

3:29 particularly for abstract concepts, rather than actual physical things.

3:33 So what about emotions?

3:36 Emotions do get categorized in different ways

3:39 by different humans all over the world.

3:41 In English, we can use the same word for two different feelings.

3:44 If someone says "I'm sad",

3:45 do they mean "crying in the corner" or "depressed, tired, and staying in bed"?

3:51 Those are both sad in the same way that the sky and the ocean are both blue.

3:55 But even if a child only knows the word "sad",

3:58 they've not heard of "despondent' or 'listless' or 'morose' or 'ennui',

4:02 well, the underlying emotions are still different,

4:03 they can still tell whether someone's grieving the devastating loss

4:06 of their cartoonishly large lollipop or whether

4:09 they're just tired and generally down.

4:11 Having the different words is really helpful for expressing yourself,

4:14 but they don't determine your ability to feel emotions.

4:18 And Ancient Greek had a lot of words for love:

4:21 in English those are all basically translated

4:24 as 'love' with a lot of extra notes, but even though we only have one basic

4:28 word to explain all those feelings and emotions, we still experience them,

4:32 and we can communicate them without knowing Ancient Greek.

4:35 It just takes a few more words.

4:37 Until recently, English did not have a word

4:39 for "feeling joy at someone else's misfortune",

4:42 but we still definitely experienced it

4:44 before we borrowed "schadenfreude" from German.

4:47 So the simple answer to the question is: no.

4:50 Not really.

4:51 It might change how you listen to sounds,

4:53 it might make some things easier to explain,

4:55 but the idea that you can stop people

4:57 bringing down the government by changing their language is,

5:01 thankfully, just fiction.

5:03 And if you want even more linguistics,

5:05 my co-author Gretchen McCulloch has a podcast called "Lingthusiasm".

5:09 The link is on screen and in the description.