Ingrid’s Space

Linguistic Relativity and the Tyranny of the Compiler

The idea has been floating around in Linguistics for about a century, that language affects one’s thoughts. Known as linguistic relativity, aka the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this comes in two flavours: the strong version, where language determines and limits thought; and the weak version, where language only influences thought.1 For human languages, linguists largely agree that the strong version is false, and instead hold to the weak version. We can propose a mechanism to explain this starting from two premises: humans are capable of abstract thought in the absence of language, and are capable of modifying their languages.