Does our language infl uence the way we think?
Geoff rey K. Pullum
How are language and thought related? Do you think the way you do because of the language you speak?
What’s the real story on Eskimo words for ‘snow’?
A surprising number of the things people say about thinking are actually expressed as claims about language. People say ‘We didn’t even speak the same language’ when they really mean that our thoughts were totally diff erent; ‘I was speechless’ nearly always means that I was astonished rather than that my voice stopped working;
and so on.
Of course, language and thought are doubtless quite closely related. Language permits thoughts to be represented explicitly in our minds, helping us reason, plan, remember, and communicate.
It’s communication that gets all the press when we talk about lan-guage, but could it be that the language we use causes us to think in certain ways?
Does our language influence the way we think? 71
Diff erent languages do put things diff erently. But does that mean some thoughts can only be expressed in one language? Is it possible to have thoughts in one language that can’t be translated into another? Most of the people who think the answer to these questions is yes turn out to have nothing in mind other than word meanings.
It is pretty easy to fi nd words in one language that don’t have exact equivalents in another. Th e German word Schadenfreude is a famous example (it refers to a kind of malicious pleasure some people fi nd in other people’s misfortunes). But does the lack of a one-word exact English equivalent mean that English speakers aren’t able to experience that feeling themselves or recognize it in others? Surely not (and I believe I just explained in English what it means, too).
Another familiar example concerns color: some languages have far fewer words than English for naming primary colors.
Quite a few use the same word for both ‘green’ and ‘blue’. Some have only four, or three, or two color-name words. Does this mean their speakers can’t physically distinguish multiple colors? It seems not. An experiment in the 1960s found that members of a New Guinea tribe (the Dani people) whose language named only two colors were just as good at matching a full spectrum of color chips as English speakers.
And lest we forget, I’d better mention the tired old claim that Eskimos see the world diff erently because they have some huge number of words for diff erent varieties of snow. You may be dis-appointed to learn that there’s hardly any truth to this. Th e eight languages of the Eskimo family have only a modest number of snow terms. Four were mentioned in a 1911 description of a Canadian Eskimo language by the great anthropologist Franz Boas: a general word for snow lying on the ground; a word for ‘snowfl ake’; one for
‘blizzard’; one for ‘drift ’; and that was it. His point had nothing to do with numbers of words or their infl uence on thinking, but just
with the way diff erent languages draw slightly diff erent distinctions when naming things.
But aft er years of exaggeration and embellishment of Boas’s remarks, a seductive myth has arisen. People with no knowledge of Eskimo languages repeat over and over in magazines, newspapers, and lectures that the Eskimos have X words for snow, the number X varying wildly from the dozens to the thousands between diff erent tellings of the story. Th ey off er no evidence, and they ignore the fact that English, too, has plenty of words for snow—words like ‘slush’,
‘sleet’, ‘avalanche’, ‘blizzard’, and ‘fl urry’.
Do the vocabularies of Eskimo languages really give their speakers—the Inuit and Yup’ik peoples of arctic Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland—a unique way of perceiving, unshared by English speakers? Perhaps it’s true in some subtle way, but people overstate the possibility grossly. Some go as far as claiming that your language creates your world for you, and thus that speakers of diff erent languages live in diff erent worlds. Th is is relativism taken to an extreme.
Th e idea that our language inexorably shapes or determines how we think is pure speculation, and it’s hard to imagine what could possibly support that speculation even in principle. For one thing, there is surely some thought (in the minds of animals, for instance) that is done without the aid of language. But notice also that in order for you to know there was a thought that was understandable for a speaker of (say) Hindi but not for you as an English speaker, you’d need to have that Hindi thought explained to you
Take as an example the Hindi word kal. It’s a word that picks out a particular region of time: if today is the 8th of the month, surpris-ingly kal refers to either the 9th or the 7th, whichever is appropriate.
Does that give Hindi speakers a unique and special sense of time that you can never share, where time is seen as spreading outward in both directions, and kal is one day away from now in either direction?
Well, if so, then I have just explained it to you, and that means you can understand it aft er all.
Does our language influence the way we think? 73
Certainly, it is not impossible that your view of the world may be infl uenced in some subtle ways by the way your native language tempts you to classify concepts; but that doesn’t mean that your language defi nes a shell within which your thought is confi ned, or that there are untranslatable thoughts that only a speaker of some other language can have. If you fi nd yourself trying to think an unthinkable thought, don’t give up and blame your language; just think a little harder.
About the author
Geoff rey K. Pullum is a linguist with broad scholarly interests in lan-guage, especially in topics relating to the grammar of English. He was born in the U.K., and worked there and in Europe as a rock musician for some years before going to college. He received his B.A. in Language at the University of York and earned the Ph.D. in General Linguistics at the University of London. He has taught at University College London, the University of Washington, and Stanford University, and since 1981 has been a tenured faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), where from 1987 to 1993 he also served as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He has published over two hundred articles and books, ranging from techni-cal works on syntactic theory to a handbook on phonetic transcription (Phonetic Symbol Guide, Chicago, second edition 1996) and a collection of satirical essays about the study of language (Th e Great Eskimo Vocabu-lary Hoax, Chicago, 1991). His most recent books (both co-authored with Rodney Huddleston) are Th e Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and a textbook based on it, A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar (2005). Th e Cambridge Grammar, a 1862-page detailed description of the linguistic structure of international standard English, revises the traditional description of Eng-lish in numerous ways. It was awarded the Linguistic Society of America’s Leonard Bloomfi eld Book Award in January 2004.
Suggestions for further reading
Whorf, Benjamin Lee., ed. by John B. Carroll. Language, Th ought and Reality: Selected Writings (MIT Press, 1964). Edited collection of the (fairly accessible) writings of Whorf, who was perhaps the most impor-tant popularizer of the idea that language shapes thought.
Preston, John, ed. Th ought and Language (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 42) (Cambridge University Press, 1997). A collection of serious papers on language/thought relations by some important modern philosophers.
Lucy, John Arthur. Language Diversity and Th ought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Major book-length study of the ‘linguistic relativity’ hypothesis that the grammar of our native language aff ects the way we think about reality; it contrasts English with the Yucatec Maya language of Mexico.