Is language merely a tool for expressing thought, or is it the very framework that shapes thought itself?
The question has vexed philosophers and linguists since antiquity.
Linguistic relativity — the view that speakers of a language carve up the world along the vocabulary and grammatical categories that language provides, so that speakers of different languages inhabit different realities — was once dismissed for want of scientific support, yet recent empirical work has brought it a partial rehabilitation.
There is no shortage of reports suggesting that the structure of one’s native tongue influences cognitive tendencies in such matters as the division of colour, the grasp of space, and the expression of time.
It would be hasty, though, to conclude that language determines thought outright.
The very fact that translation, however imperfectly, works at all testifies to a stratum of meaning that can be shared across the barrier of language.
A sounder understanding, surely, is that human cognition rests on a universal foundation prior to language, and that languages are the diverse structures erected upon it.
Even so, and even if determinism is rejected, one cannot make light of the fact that language steers the habits of thought.
We view the world through the spectacles of our mother tongue, and we do not easily notice that the spectacles are there at all.
It is precisely here that learning a foreign language takes on a significance beyond the mastery of a practical skill.
Immersing oneself in another linguistic system relativises the way of carving up the world that one had taken for granted, and becomes an occasion for cultivating flexibility of mind.
Conversely, the importance of nurturing richness in one’s own language must equally be stressed.
The power to handle abstract concepts, to articulate fine distinctions, and to construct complex arguments does not grow without linguistic training.
One need not go so far as to say that poverty of vocabulary is poverty of thought, but that the two are deeply bound up with each other admits of no doubt.
In an age when digital media have spread and short, fragmentary exchanges of words are coming to blanket daily life, we would do well to look again at the value of settling down to read and to write at length.
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