Some of the differences between languages are obvious. They sound different. Written words look different. Another difference, however, is more subtle. One language may not have a word that corresponds to a word in another language. Research on emotion words illustrates this (Wierzbicka, 1999). Tahitian contains no word that corresponds to the English word “sad.” English has no word that corresponds to the Polish przykro, a negative emotion experienced when someone doesn’t display an expected amount of affection. German does not contain a word that corresponds precisely to the English word “emotion.”

These differences raise a big question: What is the relation between language and thought? When thinking about people’s feelings, do speakers of Tahitian, English, Polish, and German have the same types of thoughts, or do they have fundamentally different thoughts because their languages differ? If your language doesn’t contain a word corresponding to przykro, will you recognize the feelings of someone who did not receive an expected amount of affection?

Two twentieth-century scholars who studied language and culture, Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf, believed that language determines the nature of thought. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) claims that language shapes thinking, with the result that people who speak different languages think differently about the world around them. The effect of language on thinking primarily involves categorization. A language’s words furnish categories that people use when they think; therefore, speakers of different languages, which contain different words, have different thoughts. You cannot, for example, have the thought that some people are “nerds” unless you speak a language that contains the word “nerd.”

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If correct, this hypothesis is tremendously important for understanding human cultures. People who speak a different language than you may have a fundamentally different view of reality. Their perception of good and bad, right and wrong, may differ from yours.

Is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis correct? Some evidence does support it. One supportive study explored how language affects the way people think about the locations of objects. In English, we say adjacent objects are to the “left” and “right” of each other. In a native Mesoamerican language spoken in Mexico, people say they are to the east and west of each other; this language employs geographic words instead of left and right. It turns out that the words affect people’s interactions with objects. If you align objects, show them to people, turn the people around 180 degrees, and ask them to realign the objects, people who speak the Mesoamerican language will reverse the original left–right ordering in order to preserve their east–west ordering (Levinson, 1996). This impact of language on thought supports the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

Such support, however, is relatively rare (Bloom & Keil, 2001). Other evidence contradicts the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, as we’ll see now.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay tested the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis by studying people’s thoughts about colors (Berlin & Kay, 1969; Kay et al., 1997). Languages vary in how many color terms they possess. A language spoken in New Guinea, for example, has only two color words: One refers to a range of greens, blues, and dark colors, and the other to white plus a range of reds, yellows, and orange (Foley, 1997). Other languages have as many as 11 color terms that all speakers use frequently. If language affects thought, people who speak languages with different numbers of color terms should think differently about colors.

However, they don’t. People who speak different languages think similarly about color. When Berlin and Kay showed participants color chips (Figure 8.7) and asked which were the best (i.e., the purest example of their general type of color), speakers of different languages identified the same colors. For example, speakers of a language with fewer than four color terms identified the same red, yellow, green, and blue chips as speakers of English. Later research confirmed these findings (Regier, Kay, & Cook, 2005). The results contradict the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis because language variations did not produce variations in thinking. Why not?

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The simplest explanation is that people’s thoughts about color are influenced by the workings of the visual system. The human visual system responds to some shades of color more strongly than to others (see Chapter 5). The visual system is universal. As a result, there are universal tendencies in the ways in which people categorize colors (Figure 8.8).

Berlin and Kay’s findings raise a broader point. Human thinking is embodied (see also Chapter 7). That is, when we think about abstract concepts, such as color, we use parts of the mind that evolved to relate our physical body to physical objects. Mental systems that originally evolved to help us perceive objects (to see and smell them) and to move our body toward or away from those objects are used in various forms of thinking (Barsalou, 1999; see also Chapter 6). Contrary to what Sapir and Whorf hypothesized, thinking is affected by more than just language.

Not only does language influence thought, but the opposite is also true: Thought influences language. People often formulate an idea that they have trouble putting into words. The idea thus exists before language to express the idea is formulated.

Evidence that thoughts can precede language comes from the study of gesture (McNeill, 2005). Gestures are bodily movements, such as motions involving the arms, hands, and fingers that convey meaning. Sometimes you may struggle to put into words a meaning that you already have communicated by gesturing; for example, if you are trying to describe the complex movements of a dancer, you might start moving your hands and arms like the dancer did before you can formulate a sentence that describes the dancer’s movements in words. Some psychologists view the mind as engaged in back-and-forth dialogue between mental images and language (McNeill, 2005).

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