Language and Thought

Do Yupik speakers, from western Alaska, think of snow differently than non-Yupik speakers because they have so many more adjectives to describe its texture and density? Do English and Spanish speakers experience reality differently because Spanish has two verb forms for the single English verb to be? Whereas an English speaker would say “I am thin” to describe either a change in condition or a permanent condition, someone speaking Spanish would have two options: “Estoy flaco” suggests that the person is newly thin because of lost weight, and “soy flaco” implies that the person is thin by nature. In short, every time Spanish speakers say they are thin or fat they are expressing a perception of their condition as permanent or temporary depending on the verb form chosen to express it. Similarly, does the use of the subjunctive voice to express less than 100% certainty make certain languages more appropriate for diplomacy than for engineering? This entry discusses the relationship between language and thought.

In short, does this mean that words are “microcosms to human consciousness,” as the Russian psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky would suggest? This interrelation of language and thought was explored by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, in what is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The “strong” version of this hypothesis (also known as linguistic deterministic hypothesis) posits that the way we think is determined by the language we speak; on the other hand, the “weak” version (also known as linguistic relativity hypothesis) simply suggests that different languages are associated with different types of thinking, but do not de facto cause the difference. Not surprisingly, the interrelationship of language, thought, and culture has piqued the curiosity of developmental psychologists, linguistic anthropologists, psycholinguists, philosophers, theologians, cognitive scientists, and bilingual education scholars and practitioners throughout the ages.

Today, considerable research evidence supports the intuitive notion that a powerful symbiotic relationship exists between language, thought, and culture, and that the way people make meaning of the world is socially constructed. According to cognitive scholars Vera John-Steiner and Ellen Souberman, in the afterword of Mind in Society, Vygotsky looks at the individual-society relation as a dialectical process, and compares this process to the image of a river and its tributaries, which combine and separate, in the same way elements in human life do. This view challenges the notion of static polarities. Linking this dialectical notion to thought and speech, psychologist John B. Carroll says that for Vygotsky, thought and speech have natures independent of each other, each with its own life and growth. Yet, they have some form of interaction when it comes to development; sometimes language development is ahead of cognitive development, but sometimes these positions are reversed. There is a point, however, at which both processes coincide, and they influence each other: Thought becomes verbal and speech becomes rational.

Likewise, Masahiko Minami, who specializes in English-Japanese children's stories, concludes from his own research that language and thought are inseparable. That is, the particular language that children [Page 426]speak and read determines how they perceive and think about the world. Although most studies so far support the interrelationship between language, thought, and culture, not all researchers agree with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (the “weak” version mentioned earlier), which states that as human languages differ so do the ways their speakers think. Some researchers have questioned it, but others have marshaled evidence to challenge it. They believe that a rock is a rock no matter what it is called in whatever language and cultural context, and that we can communicate via written and visual symbols across cultures to some degree, even if we do not speak each other's language. Matters tend to get more complicated, however if we substitute democracy or justice in place of “a rock.”

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