Restricting available vocabulary restricts the thoughts that can be readily formulated or argued.
Orwell's 1949 device, and a fictional strong-Whorfian claim. The underlying linguistic thesis is contested — linguists reject strong determinism, and weak influence on categorisation has support.
In practice
- A staff survey with no category for "the work is pointless" returns no reports of pointless work.
- The defensible institutional version is narrower: an organisation that has no word for a category of failure finds it harder to raise, which is about categories rather than about thought itself.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is cost: removing a word makes the thought more expensive to form, since the speaker must build it from longer phrases. Another is social, since a vocabulary signals what may be said, and self-censorship follows the signal rather than the grammar.
- In its favour
- Weak linguistic influence has support: the categories a language marks affect what speakers notice and remember, and political euphemism measurably changes how policies are judged.
- Against it
- Strong linguistic determinism is rejected in linguistics: speakers coin and borrow words for whatever they need, and dissidents under censorship have described precisely what was forbidden.
- Standing
- A fictional strong-Whorfian device; the underlying claim about language and thought is contested.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience