500 Words: On Linguistic Relativity

Language can change our experience, from friends to forests to identity.

Linguistic relativity is a concept I found myself circling around earlier this year. It is the idea that language can change your thought pattern, worldview, and the way you function. Only I didn’t know the term for it until last week, ironically. 

I’d been researching the topic of nuance when I came across a fascinating BBC Sounds series called The Death of Nuance. I remember sunbathing in my backyard in London making my way through every episode in one go, scribbling notes furiously as I went. I found myself rewinding and relistening to one particular episode on how language can expand or limit our capacity for nuance. One of the interviewees was a psychologist, Tim Lomas, who, since 2015 had been creating a collection of ‘untranslatable words’. He spoke of the power of words to bring things into being. He gave an example of the Chinese word Shinrin-yoku - meaning ‘forest bathing’ or nature therapy. He reflected on how his learning of this word changed his experience when he next found himself in a forest. 

I distinctly remember how poignant it was to reflect on the fact that in other languages there are so many more words for different types of love - the love of a mother, romantic love, the love of art. Oliver Burkeman, hosting the interview, reflected on whether he rarely told his friends he loved them because it felt like that one word was so loaded and weighty. Was this lack of language affecting the capacity of his relationships? A tweet went viral earlier this year on this exact topic. It was about the fact that in Arabic there are 12 words for 12 levels of friendship. It got more than 15,000 retweets. This idea has actually helped me navigate changes in friendships in the past, understanding that someone can transform into a different type of friend, either up or down the ladder, over time. 

In Lomas’ opening lines of his TedX talk on how language can change our experience, he says ‘words allow us to understand our worlds’. I was at a queer film and art night last week where the host echoed exactly this sentiment too but with specific reference to identity. They reflected on the importance of language used in queer culture to help them understand who they were and to help them become who they are. To experience themselves described by someone else and to be able to full step into their identity. 

It was thanks to an interview in The Napkin Poetry Review - which explores and celebrates poetry within a scientific and interdisciplinary context, that I finally, yet for the first time, came across the scientific concept of linguistic relativity. A neuroscience researcher for leading studies on poetry’s detection in the brain, Dr. Guillaume Thierry, was reflecting on how he was initially sceptical of the theory, first put forward in the 1940s. But, drawn to the controversy of the theory he decided to put it to the test and discovered that ‘there is very strong science supporting that language can change the way you think and feel and perceive the world.’ 

And it is with the irony of learning about the concept of linguistic relativity that I now sense a new world of possibilities opening up.