How does language affect the way I think? This complex question has become quite popular over the years. It is difficult to measure, for sure, how significantly language impacts the mind given to the amount of different life experiences and interactions that make up part of how a person thinks. Each person we meet, in some way, affects us. Language is the link that shape our interactions and impacts our minds. Language most definitely affects how we think, but we can never be sure to what extent. Language has always been something incredibly important to the human race. A babies development shows us that our minds were geared toward learning language and how to communicate. There is even a study that reports that babies start to learn their
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One specific language spoken in Australia, called Guugu Yimithirr, is very heavily studied because it has no egocentric words, or words focused on themselves. They don’t use words like left or right, but instead north or south. This interested many scientists and brought about several studies. The most curious of which was done by showing one native English speaker and one native Guugu Yimithirr speaker a room facing south, and then showing them both a room across the hall that had the exact same layout but was facing north. The English speaker saw the rooms as identical, but the Guugu Yimithirr speaker saw the room as entirely different. Their languages made them see the same circumstances as completely different. The challenge is that we can’t prove that it was only language because of the impossibility of taking out the influence of differing cultures.
One important aspect that many people doing these studies seem to forget is that we can think without using words. Granted most of the time we are thinking with language, but language is only the top layer of our minds (Source 1). Our senses have no need for language to process, only to describe them to an observer. Just remembering a picture from a memory does not require
One specific language spoken in Australia, called Guugu Yimithirr, is very heavily studied because it has no egocentric words, or words focused on themselves. They don’t use words like left or right, but instead north or south. This interested many scientists and brought about several studies. The most curious of which was done by showing one native English speaker and one native Guugu Yimithirr speaker a room facing south, and then showing them both a room across the hall that had the exact same layout but was facing north. The English speaker saw the rooms as identical, but the Guugu Yimithirr speaker saw the room as entirely different. Their languages made them see the same circumstances as completely different. The challenge is that we can’t prove that it was only language because of the impossibility of taking out the influence of differing cultures.
One important aspect that many people doing these studies seem to forget is that we can think without using words. Granted most of the time we are thinking with language, but language is only the top layer of our minds (Source 1). Our senses have no need for language to process, only to describe them to an observer. Just remembering a picture from a memory does not require