How does language shape the way we think?

Imagine that you're spending a lovely afternoon with your friend in his home and you're starting to have a headache. You want to buy some drugs so you ask him where is the closest pharmacy. The friend tells you: "The pharmacy is north from you". Is it helpful? It is believed that human beings are not good in distinguishing the world directions without using some divices. Most of languages have an egocentric coordination system that refers to the human body (your "right side" might be someone else's "left side"; it depends on your positions). But there are some languages, for example Tseltal Mayan (spoken in one region of Mexico), where the world directions might be taken as reference. Across languages, there are also differences in describing relations between objects. It can be observed by comparing different preposition systems: English (as French and Polish) makes a distinction between the prepositions on and above . In the first case,...

As you already know, language influences the way that we see the world around us. Each of you perceives various aspects of your sourroundings a bit differently. But what happens when somebody has two mother tongues? How does he or she perceive the world? And what about people who learned a second language in their adult life? First of all, we need to notice the difference between learning language as a mother tongue and in adulthood. The truth is that we (people who started studying languages at school) rarely achieve native-speaker's fluency. Even if we spend enormously lot of time and effort on this activity. The thing is that babies have this amazing ability to acquire every natural language that exists in our world exceptionally fast. Some studies on 11 moths babies (where the magnetoencephalography technology has beed used) have shown that they can process sounds of two languages that they are affected even before they actual...

When someone tells us to order something chronologically , we understand it as placing the situations that happend a long time ago on the left side and the actions that were made recently on the right side. Do you agree? But does the word 'chronologically' mean the same for everyone? Let's come back for a minute to the person that I mentioned last time: Benjamin Lee Whorf. This American linguist worked on the perception of time by speakers of Hopi language (used by inhabitants of Arizona in USA). In his book about this subject, he showed that they don't have any words, expressions or grammatical forms that refer precisely to what we call 'time', 'present', 'future'... For Hopi speakers, time is experienced (and expressed in language) totally differently. (I need to add that this idea and the results of Whorf's research were widely critisised. As I have written before, I only present different experiments and studies - chosen subjecitively...

W hen you read the title of my blog, you conclude that language does influence the way we think. But it was not (and is still not) obvious for everyone. Some people believe that language is a reaction to the world around us; that our sourroundings shape the way we express. There is this well-know example of Eskimos who have invented different words to describe different types of snow. Why have they done it? Because they needed. Because, for somebody who lives in an igloo, it is crucial to make this disctincion. Does it mean that the topic of my blog doesn't make any sense? Not really. I would like to start with bringing you closer a very intereting linguistic hypothesis that encouraged me to start tinking about language as something more that an instrument of communication - sending our thoughts to others. According to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , language influences the way we see the world far more than we think. There are two versions of this idea: The strong version ...