Does language decide what you think?

Native Russian-speakers see the colour blue differently from native English-speakers, reports New Scientist.

Russian has no single word to describe the colour we (English speakers) understand as ‘blue’ – instead they make a distinction between light blue, pronounced “goluboy”, and dark blue, pronounced “siniy”. As a result, Russians are 10% faster at distinguishing light and dark blue colours.

“So Ruskies can get dressed quicker in the morning, so what” you might be thinking. Well, in addition to being a natty fact you can casually drop in to your next dinner party conversation to trump that old Eskimo /words for snow myth (more on that another day), this is good news for fans of the Sapir–Whorf school of linguistic thought.

Put simply, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that language is not merely a passive mirror for our world, it actually influences the way in which we think about life.

Perhaps the best (and most sinister) example of S-W thinking is ‘Newspeak’, the fictional language of George Orwell’s 1984. Newspeak is a language with no way of expressing supposedly undesirable concepts such as ‘freedom’ – the belief being that if you can’t say it, you can’t think it.

Newspeak is obviously Sapir–Whorf-ing to the max, totally totalitarian-style, so don’t go assuming that SW is automatically A Bad Thing.

In any case, Noam “language is innate” Chomsky and Steven “thought is independent of language” Pinker have tag-team-trashed the Sapir–Whorf thinking pretty hard in recent years, so it’s not much to worry about any more.

Well, until these fascinating Russians and their blues of course – who’s up for another Sapir–Whorf revival?