Does the language you speak change how you think?

And that's it for the Language Files! Thanks to co-authors Molly and Gretchen, animator Will, and sound mixers Graham and Manni who had to deal with an omnidirectional microphone in an echoey room…! Here's the full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL96C35uN7xGLDEnHuhD7CTZES3KXFnwm0

English used to not have a future tense but now we have an entire dedicated word for “Tomorrow” so ima guess it doesn’t

It’s just your language. If you weren’t already brainwashed you’d understand.

I think it's more to vocabulary than the "language" itself. The more bad words you have, the more you bad you will become, and vice versa.

Though studies show that knowing more than one language is advantageous when it comes to cognition.

THANK YOU. – Sincerely, a linguist.

The way it changes the way you think will be very hard to disentangle using the same language. It’s too hyperdimensional for survey style methods to examine, I expect.

Russian here, words "приватность" and "уединение" do exist

I think that for a proper study to occur scientists would also have to consider that not only cultures shapes language but also the other way around, they are interconnected and mantain a relationship that keeps evolvimg back and fort simultaneously.

That one jungle language where there are no numbers and only "many" and "few" and no abstract concepts kinda disproofs this no? Also some language which a fixed direction thing where there is only north south west east and no front back left right, it kinda changes how you think.

As someone who speaks 4 languages fluently, 2 of them being native and 2 acquired, I'd say that it definitely widens your perspective. But then again, there's no way of telling if it has more to do with the language itself or the culture that you have to adopt to an extent in order to learn the language better.

i love how every single commenter is presenting anectodal, self-reported "evidence" on how language changes the way they think. my good people, you don't think in words, those come after thoughts

Chicken and egg situation. The language doesn't have a word because the people didn't think of the concept. But when there's a word to communicate the concept, it can be communicated to people who haven't come up with it on their own, thus shaping their thoughts just by sharing a language.

This has already been proven true by linguistic studies and anyone who is actually bilingual will notice it aswell

In Russian there is the word for privacy, it is still transliteration from Latin privatus: "приватность"

I think the idea is that removing words that could be used to criticize the government helps stop the spread of antigovernment sentiment among the populous. In 1984 many people do have antigovernment thoughts ans ideas, they just cant share them.

I may disagree. You see all of the words he used still had the semantic sphere. So yes we can experience self love without Greek, but without words for self? Or personal? Or individuality? I don’t know. No experiment could ever be done on this. However, without this semantic sphere, it is likely there would still be a large affect on thought. Also, even with simple physical things like numbers, words DO change how we think. Different words for color influences how we see color. Different words for time and active vs passive in Latin changed how the Roman’s thought incredibly.

I think there's a missing distinction here between "language can affect the way you can think" versus "language can affect the way you think about things in practice". And I'm not sure all of that can necessarily be explained away just by cultural differences.

I am an ESL instructor. To say that language doesn't affect the way people think presumes that we understand how human brains think, but we do not. So while I agree that what we feel emotionally or what we perceive as sensory information and how we conceptualize our experience with any language is probably very similar from one human to another. However, different languages organize ideas in different ways. How we organize concepts and ideas in our minds or as language for communicating them varies from one language to another. This is reflected in the way an Italian learning English will commonly express an idea in the same way using English as they would in Italian. An Italian is very likely to say "No speak I very well the English," rather than "I don't speak English very well as a native English speaker would. This is because in Italian they would say, "Non Parlo molto bene il Englese," which literally translates into, "No speak I very well the English." I think your take on this focuses too much on what people think and experience, which is probably universal, vs how people think which is about structure and syntax and the way concepts and ideas are organized in language. We do think with language, try not thinking or thinking without language and you will easily understand how closely language and think are associated. From this perspective it becomes quite clear that language does indeed determine how we thing but not what we think or can experience.