The Influence of Language on the Perception of the World

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis theorizes that the structure of a language determines a native speaker’s perception and interpretation of every experience they have. This paper will examine this hypothesis closely and take a deep look at how a person’s language can influence their perception of the world.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was first formulated by American linguist E. Sapir in his 1929 essay “The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” which warned that the science of linguistics may have deep implications for the interpretation of human conduct. In 1940, another American linguist, B.L. Whorf reformulated the hypothesis in his essay “Science and Linguistics” to what it is today, a theory on how the language in which we think determines the character of our thoughts. Their combined theory was called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and quickly became highly controversial, as it implied that speakers of different languages perceive the world in different ways. Many feared that if reality is uniquely perceived according to spoken language, then an “objective” world does not exist. Sapir responded to this criticism by saying that his theory doesn’t directly link language to objective reality. He instead argues that an objective reality exists, but objective perception does not. The subjectivity of perception is shaped by language; therefore, people who think in different languages perceive the world differently. Whorf also added that language does not completely determine a person’s worldview, but no individual can describe the world objectively. Consequently, when any two people are presented with the same reality, they will never observe the same picture of the universe; but their picture will be most similar if their linguistic backgrounds are similar (Hussein, 2012).

Through various studies, cognitive scientists have been able to determine that differences in language have effects on perception. A 2016 study by Cibelli et al. examined the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis through the lens of cognition and perception of color. The study consisted of three experiments that were analyzed and fitted to models to find language discrimination in color recognition and memory. The second experiment in this study focused on color discrimination across languages by using a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task. In a 2AFC task, the participant is shown a color briefly then shown two colors side-by-side, one being the original and the second being a distractor color. Three languages were used in this study: English, Berinmo and Himba, a language of Papa New Guinea and Namibia respectively. After analysis, this experiment found that each language had very distinct categories for colors in the range of dark yellow to purple. When the distractor color and the original color were in the same color category in the participant’s language, they made far more mistakes when identifying the original color than when it was not. This result suggests that the perception of color is very different for people of different linguistic backgrounds since the linguistic categorization of color allowed real-life discrimination or blending of various areas of the visible spectrum (Cibelli, 2016).

Another study, conducted by He et al. in 2019, shows a different way in which language differences lead to color perception differences. In this paper, Mongolian-speaking and Mandarin-speaking participants performed two tasks. One was a free-sorting task, where a participant is given objects and is allowed to sort without direction. The other was as a visual search task, where a participant’s eye movements are recorded as they scan an image. Mongolian and Mandarin speakers were chosen for this study because of the color differences and similarities in these languages for the green-blue spectrum. In Mongolian, light blue (“qinker”) and dark blue (“huhe”) are strictly distinct, while green, regardless of shade is described as one word, nogvgan. In Mandarin, however, blue is described by one word, lán, and green is described by one word, lǜ .

In the free sorting task, Mongolian speakers exhibited a clear distinction between light and dark blue but the same sorting in the green region, while Mandarin speakers did not show a distinction in either category. In the visual sorting task, both Mandarin and Mongolian speakers reacted faster to the green color than the blue color, suggesting that some aspects of human color perception may be universal. However, Mongolian speakers discriminated against visual search displays, or were able to tell the two colors apart, when the colors fell into different linguistic categories, qinker or huhe, quicker than visual search displays that belonged to the same linguistic category, both displays being qinker. This discrimination effect was also disrupted in Mongolian participants who were asked to perform a secondary task that engaged verbal working memory, the part of the brain that keeps verbal information online and ready for use, but not when the task engaged spatial working memory, the part of the brain that keeps spatial information online and ready for use, this is likely due to the fact that verbal working memory takes up linguistic resources while spatial working memory does not. This difference in secondary task interference further suggests a linguistic root to the color discrimination and the effect of linguistic interference. In contrast, Mandarin speakers performing the visual search task did not show any category advantage under any of the conditions in the experiment (He, 2019). Overall, this experiment supports the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by strongly suggesting that language usage affects an individual’s perception of colors.