As we have seen, our language use can affect our thoughts. Consider the study of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil (Gordon, 2004) that 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, 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. Two ideas, linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity, are related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Linguistic determinism posits that language influences how we see the world around us. Linguistic relativity holds that speakers of different languages have different views of the world.

For example, some languages (like Spanish, French, and German) assign a gender to objects. This is 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). Some researchers wondered if marking an object as masculine or feminine changes a speaker’s mental picture of the object. To test this, they asked German and Spanish speakers to describe a key (key is a masculine word in German and a feminine word in Spanish). The German speakers described the object in traditionally masculine terms (hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful), whereas the Spanish speakers used traditionally feminine terms (golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny) (Cook, 2002; Moran, 2003; Wasserman & Weseley, 2009).