Does Your Language Shape How You Think ?

Abstract

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 peoples idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance 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 languages power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.