As we have seen, our language use can affect our thoughts. Consider a study of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil (Gordon, 2004). The study shows that the Pirahã language does not have words for numbers above two—anything above two is simply called “many.” When researchers laid a random number of familiar objects (like sticks and nuts) in a row, and asked the Pirahã to lay out the same number of objects in their own pile, tribe members were able to match the pile if there were three or fewer objects. But for numbers above three, they would only approximately match the pile, becoming less and less accurate as the number of objects increased. In addition, when researchers asked them to copy taps on the floor, the Pirahã did not copy the behavior beyond three taps. Researchers concluded that the limitation of words for numbers above two prevented the Pirahã from perceiving larger numbers (Biever, 2004).

The study’s findings support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (also known as linguistic relativity theory), which holds that the words a culture uses (or doesn’t use) influence the thinking of people from that culture (Sapir & Whorf, 1956). In other words, if a culture lacks a word for something (as the Pirahã lack words for higher numbers), members of that culture will have few thoughts about that thing or concept. Thus language influences or determines how we see the world around us, and speakers of different languages develop different views of the world relative to their language. For example, some languages (like Spanish, French, and German) assign a gender to objects. This is a bit of a foreign concept to many native speakers of English because English is gender-neutral—English speakers simply say the shoe whereas a Spanish speaker marks the word as masculine (el zapato, el being the masculine article); a French speaker marks the word as feminine (la chaussure, la being the feminine article). Marking an object as masculine or feminine changes a speaker’s mental picture of the object. For example, German speakers describe a key (a masculine word in German) in traditionally masculine terms (hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful) whereas Spanish speakers describe a key (a feminine word in Spanish) in traditionally feminine terms (golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny) (Wasserman & Weseley, 2009).