You Are What You Speak: Sapir-Whorf

The Sapir-Whorf principle is also known as 'the principle of linguistic relativity'. It claims that our conception of the world is shaped by--even controlled by--our language.

The 'strong' version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that that language determines thought--in other words, you can't think at all outside the boxes created by the words you use. The 'weak' version holds that language influences, but does not completely determine thought.

This theory led linguists in the 70's to investigate colour perception. They eventually found that although we tend to segment the colour spectrum according to the ways our language provides for us, we are nevertheless able to see all the colours. (This supports the weak version.) Traditional Welsh, for example, has the word 'glas', that describes a certain grey/green/blue colour. English speakers don't have that word, but they can see the colour.

In her science fiction novel, Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin shows how linguistic relativity works, and how the words we have available to us control what we do and do not perceive. She does it by inventing both a word, and the concept that it describes:

"When you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, a face, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of the body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the bend of the elbow. Everyone has that surface; in fact, everyone has two of them.
I will name that the 'athad' of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind -- perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And there are both of your athads, very nice ones.
Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. From now on.... Now it exists. Now I can say, 'What beautiful athads you have.' "

The process of learning another language in sufficient depth to really speak it changes us. Every language describes the world differently. Those of us who are bilingual can tend to feel we have two personalities inside us, with slightly (or considerably) different conceptions of the world. The way we are in the world, and who we feel ourselves to be, varies depending which language we are speaking.

Even if are monolingual, we may have had a flavour of what this is like. Most of us have probably had the experience of knowing something, but knowing that we knew it until someone named it for us. For example, I knew I had a certain way of interacting with nature, but couldn't describe it, or explain why it was different from another way of interacting with nature, until I read Martin Buber's book I And Thou. Buber coined the term "I/Thou relationship". When I read it, I knew instantly what he meant, that it described my experience, and that it rendered that experience communicable for the first time. This reflects the weak form of linguistic relativity--I was able to experience something, but that experience was not fully conceivable until I was provided with language that could express it.

This is why communication--especially therapy--is tricky across languages. It's one root of 'othering'--it's hard to really get the world view of a person of a different linguistic culture, and even harder to get that their 'strange' worldview is equally real, equally normal, and equally valid, unless you have had the experience of trying to squeeze your reality through the funnel of a foreign language.