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: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL96C35uN7xGLDEnHuhD7CTZ…

I think that in 1984, the goal of "newspeak" is not to stop people from thinking about certain concepts, but rather stop them from communicating those concepts. The communication would cause uprising.

Literally 1984

As a multilingual person, I can say that there are plenty of times when I’m trying to say something in a particular language, but can’t, because it is something specific to another language I speak. You can usually find a roundabout way of expressing the same thought, but I find that different languages have different “flavors” that might not exist elsewhere.

I do have some anecdotal evidence that language can help highlight the difference between ideas. In Swedish "security" and "safety" are the same word "säkerhet". Until I learned English well enough I did not consider splitting up the two concepts. And I have met multiple Swedes who never didn't realise the difference between the two English words. For me it feels like languages can act like lenses that more readily reveal nuances that might not be obvious otherwise.

The thumbnails get more and more straightforward and I'm all here for it.

I believe speaking multiple languages helps your brain distinguish between concepts that are somewhat related and homonyms in one but not in another. It helps to abstract.

The big problem is the language-culture connection. Japanese is a language but it’s also a culture and trying to separate the two in an experiment is practically impossible. The only real way to measure it would be to look at how an expanded vocabulary affects the way people think but even then there are any number of reasons why people have a smaller or larger vocabulary that could change your thoughts even more also measuring vocabulary size would also be a pain to test.

Language changes how you think about things, not what you can think about. It's a filter, not a barrier.

As a French guy who's been fluent in english for 3 years, I've realised that thinking in english in my daily life made it slightly harder to express myself in french. Of course I don't have any issues with speaking to people since I do it every day, but writing essays has become a little more difficult. I've been reading a lot more in french since the beginning of the year though, and it's definitely helping revert that.

I can not find the words to express how happy I am that this series is back

As Russian native speaker I can say that we do have words for idea of privacy. Either we say “Я хочу немного личного пространства” (I want some personal space) or “Я хочу побыть один” (I want to have some time alone with myself). So that’s busted. But I have to say that writing and speaking in English in fact does change how I choose to present my thoughts. And I’m really interested to learn why it’s happening.

Even if language can't shape your thoughts, i'd say it can make some thoughts harder to express, to the point where you decide not to even share those thoughts. But most widely-used languages would probably evolve over time to address those missing meanings.

I think what is missing here is that different languages describe some aspects of reality differently which might influence how you understand and mentally construct other related things in that language. Anybody who studied other languages ran into concepts that felt alien and required a lot energy to wrap one's head around them but once it clicked it allowed you think about other things, even things in your language, in a new way.

I was introduced to the hypothesis in psych with the idea that the German word for "glove" is "Handschuh." Hand-shoe. As an English speaker, the concept of gloves had been completely discrete until that point, and I'd never made the connection that gloves are shoes for your hands. This is the most realistic application of the hypothesis that I've seen. Someone's native language is liable to shape the perspective—the lens— through which they sees the world. The meanings are technically different, the ideas are skewed— however no information is truly locked off. I'm sure millions of Americans had put together the idea that gloves are shoes for your hands in their own. It just hadn't been fed to them by their language.

As someone that can speak two languages by thinking to the languages I am about to speak, the structure of the language can affect your thinking progress and even the point you want to express. Once you get to the point that you are not thinking in your native language and speaking in the language you want to communicate with, the grammatical structure will affect your thinking process.

The biggest example I have about how language does indeed change the way you think comes down to our relationship with emotions. In English I say "I AM sad" - I have become sadness in other words In French I say " I have sadness" - Sadness being something I have picked up in other words I have always thought that this would reshape how one thought about the emotional state they were in and how attached or controlled they were by that emotion

I will say from personal experience that having a larger vocabulary has allowed me to express things easier. Most of my thought is done through inner monologue so being able to express ideas certainly helps me to think things through. edit: I'd argue that if ideas are easier to communicate, it'd be easier for descent against a government to spread. Conversely, as explored in 1984, restricting the vocabulary would make it harder to communicate ideas thereby making it harder to form a rebellion.

The word mamihlapinatapai is derived from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It has been translated as "a look that without words is shared by two people who want to initiate something, but that neither will start" or "looking at each other hoping that the other will offer to do something which both parties desire but are unwilling to do"

I think the answer is "Yes, somewhat" rather than "No. Mostly". Each word encodes a certain concept, and this is language/culture-dependent. There is also a lot of grammar that encodes certain specific types of information (social relationships, evidentiality, spatial relations, etc.). As such, if we take a speaker whose language uses different concepts and requires information that are lacking in the "translation" of the same sentence in another language, then the two speakers do not have the same thoughts. It's not about limiting what thoughts are possible, but rather about which thoughts are had.