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Shaping Thought

In addition to enabling us to share meaning during interpersonal encounters, verbal communication also shapes our thoughts and perceptions of reality. Feminist scholar Dale Spender (1990) describes the relationship between words and our inner world in this way:

To speak metaphorically, the brain is blind and deaf; it has no direct contact with light or sound. The brain has to interpret: it only deals in symbols and never knows the real thing. And the program for encoding and decoding is set up by the language which we possess. What we see in the world around us depends in large part on our language. (pp. 139–140)

Consider an encounter I had at a family gathering. My 6-year-old niece told me that a female neighbor of hers had helped several children escape a house fire. When I commended the neighbor’s heroism, my niece corrected me. “Girls can’t be heroes,” she scolded. “Only boys can be heroes!” In talking with her further, I discovered she knew of no word representing “brave woman.” Her only exposure to heroine was through her mother’s romantic novels. Not knowing a word for “female bravery,” she considered the concept unfathomable: “The neighbor lady wasn’t a hero, she just saved the kids.”

The idea that language shapes how we think about things was first suggested by researcher Edward Sapir, who conducted an intensive study of Native American languages in the early 1900s. Sapir argued that because language is our primary means of sharing meaning with others, it powerfully affects how we perceive others and our relationships with them (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). Almost 50 years later, Benjamin Lee Whorf expanded on Sapir’s ideas in what has become known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Whorf argued that we cannot conceive of that for which we lack a vocabulary—that language quite literally defines the boundaries of our thinking. This view is known as linguistic determinism. As contemporary scholars note, linguistic determinism suggests that our ability to think is “at the mercy” of language (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). We are mentally “constrained” by language to only think certain thoughts, and we cannot interpret the world in neutral ways, because we always see the world through the lens of our languages.

Both Sapir and Whorf also recognized the dramatic impact that culture has on language. Because language determines our thoughts, and different people from different cultures use different languages, Sapir and Whorf agreed that people from different cultures would perceive and think about the world in very different ways, an effect known as linguistic relativity.