11/9/11 12:06 AMDoes Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com
Page 1 of 10http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that
set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance,
there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title,
“Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most
people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insur-
ance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an
unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let
loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose se-
duced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are
able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a
picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not
be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the dis-
tinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s the-
ory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a
whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the as-
sertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understand-
ing of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of
the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it
transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic
claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influ-
ence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of
disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And
in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue,
we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant
and often surprising ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that
our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think cer-
tain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has

11/9/11 12:06 AMDoes Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com
Page 2 of 10http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this
concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be
able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of
argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence
confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the
present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futu-
rity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word
Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s
misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your
language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you
ever learn anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think
anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother
tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned
linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages
in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in
what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the
mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not
because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually
obliges us to think about.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening
with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female,
but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were
speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, be-
cause I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voi-
sine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of
my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of
course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between
evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to
consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time
they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do
so.