Does the language you speak influence how you think? Yes, but not in a rigid sense. The influence is more subtle, nuanced and more profound. This is the core idea of linguistic relativity: the notion that different languages direct their speakers’ attention toward different aspects of experience, shaping how people perceive, remember and interpret the world around them.

This is not the same as linguistic determinism, which claims that language limits thought. Nobody today believes that speakers of one language are incapable of understanding concepts expressed in another. But language does have an influence on what speakers habitually notice, how they categorise information and what distinctions they make.

As we saw in the last two articles, early popularisations of this idea, the “50 words for snow” myth, oversimplified the concept and hijacked the topic of linguistic relativity. It distracted it from more compelling evidence. There are much richer and more nuanced examples of how language and thought interact. These show that linguistic relativity is real in terms of how grammar, metaphor and structure guide our mental habits and not about X language has Y number of words for Z.

Thinking with a compass

One of the most striking cases of linguistic relativity comes from how languages describe spatial relationships. In English, we tend to use relative directions like left, right, front, behind. These are egocentric and change depending on where the speaker is facing. Other languages, such as the Indigenous Australian language Guugu Yimithirr, speakers use absolute directions: north, south, east and west, even for small-scale, everyday settings. An example of this could be “the notebook is just west of the laptop”. To speak and understand in this way, you must be constantly aware of geographic orientation. This translates into real-world cognitive differences. Research shows that speakers of these languages maintain a stronger sense of direction, even in unfamiliar environments. Their language helps them to develop and rely on a kind of internal compass.

This is a powerful example of how language can shape spatial reasoning and memory. It cultivates default settings for navigating the world.

Grammatical gender and perception

In many languages, nouns are assigned grammatical gender. In Spanish, “bridge” is “el puente”, i.e. masculine, while in German it is feminine: die Brücke. It is an arbitrary feature, but research suggests that it affects how speakers describe and perceive these objects.

In one study, when asked to describe a bridge, Spanish speakers tended to use adjective like “strong”, “solid”, “sturdy”, while German speakers described it as “beautiful”, “elegant” and “graceful”. These associations echo cultural stereotypes tied to gender. This suggests that grammatical structures can subtly shape thought, even subconsciously.

This does not mean that German speakers think bridges are inherently feminine, but it may influence how they default to thinking or speaking about certain things.

Evidentiality: knowing how you know something

In English, we say “She went to the store” and we do not have to clarify how we know this. In other languages, like Quechua or Turkish, the speaker is required to indicate the source of information. How do you know? Did you see her go? Did you hear it from someone else? Did you infer it?

This is called evidentiality and it encodes the speaker’s access to knowledge as a required part of the sentence. Over time, speakers of evidential languages develop a heightened sensitivity to source reliability and evidence tracking, because their languages constantly demand that they pay attention to it.

It illustrates how language can nudge cognition. It causes the speaker to think in a certain way, to the extent that it becomes habitually salient in thought.

Blue, blue, electric blue.

How we name colours also provides evidence for linguistic relativity. In English, we describe shades by adjectives like ‘light’ and ‘dark’, e.g. ‘light blue’ and ‘dark blue’. In Russian, there are two distinct colour terms: goluboy (light blue) and siniy (dark blue). To a Russian speaker, these are not shades of the same colour, but actually different colours, just like we separate red and pink in English. It is possible that separate linguistic categories can sharpen perceptual discrimination.

Of course, English speakers can see the difference, but Russian speakers are more attuned to that difference in a measurable way. This is because the Russian language makes the distinction more central.

Time and metaphor: The shape of abstract thought

Time is another domain where language influences thought through metaphor. In English, time is usually conceptualised as a horizontal line. The future is something we “look forward” to and the past is what we “leave behind”. In Mandarin, speakers also use vertical metaphors, where the past is “up” and the future is “down”.

In studies were English and Mandarin speakers are asked to arrange a series of photos showing temporal progressions, such as of a person aging, English speakers typically arrange them from left to right. Mandarin speakers are more likely to lay them out vertically. These differences reveal that the metaphors embedded in our language can guide how we organise and mentally structure abstract concepts. And we do this without conscious awareness.

What does this mean?

Language does not restrict thought. No speaker of English is incapable of thinking about cardinal directions or vertical time. But linguistic structures influence mental habits. They shape what people attend to regularly, what they have to encode grammatically and what becomes cognitively prominent through daily use.

However, this does not mean that people from different languages live in completely different cognitive worlds. It means that language can nudge cognition. It can emphasise certain features of experience over others. It can guide how people interpret, sort, categorise and describe what they see.

Understanding linguistic relativity is not just an intellectual exercise. It has real-world relevance, particularly in cross-cultural communication, education, psychology and translation. For example, in Clinical Outcome Assessments (COAs) or other psychological instruments, it is essential to recognise that emotional states, symptoms or temporal concepts may not map neatly between languages. A concept like “hopelessness” or “mild discomfort” may not exist in the same form across cultures. This is not because the feelings do not exist, but because there is a difference between linguistic frameworks. Another example could be the lack of distinction in many languages between “pain” and “discomfort”.

To achieve conceptual equivalence, it is not just the vocabulary that we need to understand when translating a COA. We also have to understand the cultural and linguistic structures that frame meaning.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, May 2025