The language a person speaks shapes what they can readily think.
Linguists reject strong determinism; weak influence on categorisation has support. Colour-term research and spatial-frame research supply the best evidence for the modest version.
In practice
- A speaker of a language with two basic terms where English has one sorts those colour chips faster, and sorts them the same way when asked to think it through.
- A community that gives location by compass point rather than by left and right keeps its bearings in an unlit cave, and a visitor who stays a season learns to do it too.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is habitual categorisation: a language's obligatory distinctions make speakers attend to those features routinely, which shows up in what they notice and remember rather than in what they can think at all.
- In its favour
- Colour-term and spatial-frame research supply good evidence for the modest version, where speakers of languages with different distinctions perform differently on perceptual and memory tasks.
- Against it
- Linguists reject strong determinism, since speakers can describe distinctions their language does not mark, and several celebrated cases, including the claims about Hopi time, did not survive examination.
- Standing
- Linguists reject strong determinism; weak influence on categorisation has support.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change