Does language shape thought and, is our thought changed when we speak a different language?

The answer to this question is complicated. However, the short answer is kinda..but not by much. Language is more involved than just thought and communication. Culture, traditions, lifestyle, habits, family, and society all shape the way we think and talk.

Even though thousands of studies have been conducted and entire books written on this one seemingly simple question, it’s still hotly debated. However, the majority view among serious scholars, linguistics, psychologists, and anthropologists is that thought is NOT dependent on language as language is primarily an instinct and is coded into our DNA. 

The linguistic relativity hypothesis

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, asks the question of whether speakers of different languages think differently.

This theory, which was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, proposes that our mother tongue determines the way we think and perceive the world.

Sapir and Whorf, the originators of this theory branded the theory as “linguistic relativity,” equating it to Einstein’s theory of relativity in terms of ‘importance to humanity.’

Is thought dependent on language?

The long-standing majority view on the Whorfian hypothesis is summarized in Steven Pinker’s 483-page bestseller, The Language Instinct. Pinker wrote:

In response, Pinker wrote:

But what about all those Eskimo words for snow?

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) asks the same question, “Does the language I speak influence the way I think?” In this piece, the LSA gives the classic example of how the Eskimos have dozens or even hundreds of words for snow. The LSA says, “it's simply not true that Eskimos have an extraordinary number of words for snow.”

But what???

The LSA goes on to refute this supposed Eskimo claim to fame of snowballing words through two primary reasons of logic:

1) What is an “Eskimo”?

Firstly, there isn’t one Eskimo language.

This archaic and possible offensive word, Eskimo, is generic labeling of hundreds of indigenous societies living throughout the northernmost latitudes of Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia….an area that spans nearly 4,000 miles (6,400km).

‘Eskimos' speak a variety of languages in the Inuit and Yupik languages. Both of these languages are comprised of even more distinct languages, with each having their own unique dialect.

2) What counts as “a word”? - Roots, words, & independent terms

What counts as a word?

The LSA ponders this question during their analysis of the larger dilemma of language and thought. “In English, we can combine words to get compound forms like snowball and snowflake, and we can add what are called ‘inflectional' endings, to get snowed and snowing.”

The Inuit and Yupik languages both belong to the larger Eskimo-Aleut language family. These languages are agglutinative, which mean they construct complex words out of smaller units.

In English, we can make any number of sentences out of numerous combinations of words. Eskimo-Aleut languages do the same, except they build sentences into single words.

For example, in English, you could say “snow that is so deep you are riding to infinity on a cloud of snowy love.” This is 16 words and is called a sentence. In Inuit and Yupik, this would be a single word.

In English, if we wanted to describe snow as wet, we could say, wet snow, which is two separate words. In Eskimo-Aleut languages, instead of saying ‘wet snow’, they would say the equivalent of ‘wetsnow’, which, of course, is one word.

The Eskimo-Aleut language has an infinite number of possible words for snow……and for fish..music….and everything else.

If you only count the roots, English has a comparable number of ‘snow’ words, such as; sleet, slush, frost, blizzard, avalanche, drift, and flurry. That barely even scratches the snowy surface, since ski lingo has dozens more….powder, crud, crust, corduroy, and corn, just to highlight a few.

grammatical gender & thought

Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, and Arabic are all examples of languages that use a gender system.

Grammatical gender languages assign all nouns to masculine, feminine, and/or neuter categories.

Guy Deutscher, an Israeli linguist and author of the book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, asks the question, “Can the grammatical gender of inanimate objects influence speakers’ associations?”

Dr. Deutscher contends that grammatical gender “does not restrict anyone’s capacity for reasoning” but instead “may come close to being a prison-house” of associations, and these “chains of associations” are “impossible to cast off.”

In, the ‘She-Land,’ Social Consequences of the Sexualized Construction of Landscape in North Patagonia by Paula Gabriela Nu ́n ̃ez, she says:

Patagonia was first described in Spanish, which introduces a subtle but important slant. The articles in Spanish grammar have gender; thereby the land is classified as feminine and is a ‘she-land’ directly projected in the ‘mother-land’ metaphor, usually associated with agrarian activities or cultures.

The concept of ‘Pachamama’ (‘Mother Land’ in Quechua) is a classical reference to the original people of the South American Andes. The ‘gendered’ articles not always have these projections. For example, even though ‘landscape’ is a masculine word in Spanish, the land has a stronger female character. This female character ties the non-urban landscape to a feminine consideration, because of its referral to the ‘land’ or ‘nature,’ another female word.

All nouns in Spanish have grammatical gender:

• la = feminine form of “the”

• el = masculine form of “the”

La Patagonia is feminine, and the masculine form would be El Patagonio, which to Spanish speakers just sounds weird.

Patagonia as a ‘she’ projects ‘mother/female’ qualities and is hard to dissociate those qualities from the place on a subconscious level for native Spanish speakers.

With that being said though, being “shackled” might not be so bad:

Thinking differently in a second language

When people ask the question, do you think differently in a different language, what they are really asking multilingual speakers is “do you think differently in your second language.”

Since the 1950s, thousands of studies have been conducted. However, the vast majority of research looks predominately at monolinguals.

Language and thought with regards to bilingualism have been largely untouched.

However, the paucity of research that does exist finds that bilinguals and multilingual speakers DO think differently in their second and third languages. But understanding what it means to “think differently in a different language” is a bit nuanced.

Let us go to an example to better illustrate.

There are a series of experiments conducted on more than 300 Koreans and U.S nationals that found that thinking in a second language reduces biases that ultimately affects how we perceive risks and benefits. Even though the aim of the research was different (to show where bias occurs or which language is most likely to spur rational decisions in the face of risks and benefits), it serves our purpose perfectly.

Most of us think that they would intuitively make the same choices regardless of whether they are using their first or second language and that the difficulty of using the second or third language would make their decisions a lot less systematic. According to this study, even when you are well fluent in the other language, our thinking would be different, and so would be our decisions.

As humans, our reasoning is shaped by two distinct modes of thought. One of them is quick, unconscious, and emotionally charged. The other is analytical, systematic, and highly cognition-intensive.

It’s possible that communicating in a learned language would force you to make different decisions from the ones you’d ordinarily make in your first language, which, according to the study in question, would be more deliberate. This is because the role of an unreliable instinct is reduced in the second language. According to research, immediate emotional responses to emotively charged phrases are hushed in non-native languages.

But does this really mean that one is actually thinking any differently or just “getting inside their head” even more so than they already are?

Dr. Aneta Pavlenko, Ukrainian-American linguist, and author of the book, The Bilingual Mind and What It Tells Us About Language and Thought. Is one of the foremost experts on the relationships between bilingualism, cognition, and emotion.

Dr. Pavlenko in numerous articles and books says that you don’t actually think any differently in your second language as your first. What happens, she says, is bilinguals apply the principles of their first language to their second and third languages. While it’s possible to understand the norms of a second language, integrating these linguist differences requires conscious thought. The ability to seamlessly toggle from one language to another happens every day, all over the world, but underneath the second language (L2), the L1 (first language) is always operating.

final thought

While language does not necessarily determine thoughts, and while thinking may be possible without the aid of language, the languages that we speak can have an impact on our overall perspective of our reality. But by how much? About this much (————), más o menos.

My good friend Yanira, who speaks native Spanish and fluent English (L2) says it best, “I’m Yanira in Spanish and I’m Yanira in English.”

Jesse is the Director for Pedal Chile and lives in La Patagonia (most of the year). Jesse has a Master of Science in Health and Human Performance and is an avid mountain biker. Hobbies: Reading, writing, researching, and learning.

Sources for Do You Think Differently in a Different Language:

1. Ayçiçegˇi, Ayşe, and Catherine Harris. “BRIEF REPORT Bilinguals’ Recall and Recognition of Emotion Words.” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 18, no. 7, Nov. 2004, pp. 977–987.

2. Casasanto, Daniel. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought.” Language Learning, vol. 58, Dec. 2008, pp. 63–79‌.

3. Dewaele, Jean-Marc, and Seiji Nakano. “Multilinguals’ Perceptions of Feeling Different When Switching Languages.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 34, no. 2.

4. Deutscher, Guy. Through the Language Glass : How Words Colour Your World. London, Arrow, 2011.

5. “Does the Language I Speak Influence the Way I Think?  “Linguistic Society of America.” Linguisticsociety.Org, 2012.

6. Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S. L., & An, S. G. (2012). The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases. Psychological Science, 23(6), 661–668. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611432178

7. Kroll. Judith F, and A  M  B  De Groot. Handbook of Bilingualism : Psycholinguistic Approaches. Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

8. ‌Martin, L., 1986. "Eskimo Words for Snow": A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example. American Anthropologist, 88(2), pp.418-423.

9. Núñez, Paula Gabriela. “The ‘She-Land,’ Social Consequences of the Sexualized Construction of Landscape in North Patagonia.” Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 22, no. 10, 9 Jan. 2015, pp. 1445–1462.

10. Pavlenko, Aneta, and Cambridge University Press. The Bilingual Mind : And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Druk, 2019.

11. Pavlenko, Aneta. “What Does It Mean to Think in a Second Language?” Psychology Today, 10 Mar. 2015.

12. Stam, Gale. Digital Commons@NLU. “Can an L2 Speaker’ s Patterns of Thinking for Speaking Change?” 2010.