"Linguistic determinism" is the idea that the words you use to communicate have a profound effect on how you think. An example is the Newspeak language of George Orwell's novel 1984. Another example might be your mother threatening to wash your mouth out with soap. But is there any truth to it? Further research shows that what we think and how we feel is fairly innate, no matter what language we speak or culture we originate from. It appears that the inability to express ourselves has more to do with the limits of our language than with the malleability of our thoughts. "Language relativism" is a whole other subject, and Tom Scott tries to explain the difference to us. It's a deep and complicated subject, but we don't have to understand all the intricacies of it to understand what researchers are finding out.
Tuesday, November 07, 2023
Does the Language You Speak Change How You Think?
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3 comments:
If you grow up in an Amazon tribe or Canadian tribe that speaks a unique language, you would probably think the same as speakers of that language. It would actually be your culture I guess, but the language would tag it.
When there is a precise word for a concept, it can crystalize that concept in our mind. In this sense, language can influence how we think.
Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis "is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Chomsky even dabbled in this in his earlier work.
Examples being how language is, in part, determined by environment. Eskimio's, and other far north inhabitants, have multiple words for snow rather then using adjectives such as is common in english.
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