Exploring the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and some recent research.

Do people think differently because they speak different languages? Or is it just the way they say it? It gets kind of chicken-eggy pretty quickly, but the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis nailed it down a long time ago as language shapes thought. It became the bedrock of science for decades, until it wasn’t. But now it’s back, thanks to recent research.

Named for the work of American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis posits that every language’s structure informs its speakers’ views of the world. The strong version of this hypothesis claims that one’s language can actually determine thoughts and actions, while the weak version asserts that one’s language simply influences thoughts and actions.

The strong version was more accepted before World War II, while the weak version found more favor afterwards; however, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis was never universally accepted. In fact, this hypothesis brings up a whole host of other questions, such as about translatability and the role of culture. For example, if languages contain different realities within them, can those two realities ever be equivalent enough for a perfect translation? And since language and culture are often intertwined, are we able to determine what is a product of just language and what is a product of just culture? Recent research, however, shines light on the intriguing possibilities of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

We know that men and women are still treated differently and thought of differently. But it isn’t just based on biology. Research has shown us that differences extend to how people treat and think of “gendered” virtual assistants—a technology that doesn’t actually have a gender. But what about grammatical gender?

The English language doesn’t use grammatical gender, but languages like French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian do. Grammatical gender, used by around 25% of the world’s languages, refers to how noun classes form agreements with other words like articles, pronouns and adjectives. For example, “the table” in Spanish is feminine (la mesa) while “the desk” is masculine (el escritorio).

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky studied whether grammatical gender has an effect on how people think. In her research, she asked Spanish and German speakers to recall the names (for example, Anne or Fred) that were given to 24 inanimate objects. The people were better at recalling the names when the name’s gender matched up with the gender of the object in their language.

Boroditsky then asked Spanish and German speakers to describe 24 different inanimate objects, which had opposite genders in the two languages, using three English adjectives. How “male” or “female” the adjectives were was independently rated by a group of English speakers. Interestingly, the people associated inanimate objects with masculine characteristics if the word was masculine in their language and feminine characteristics if the word was feminine. For example, Spanish speakers described a key as “tiny” and “lovely” while German speakers described a key as “hard” and “heavy.”

For skeptics of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, this research suggests that our language has a greater influence on us than we’d like to believe.

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