Language influences worldview

The language a person speaks influences how they think and perceive the world, but this does not mean that language is the only determining factor in a person's worldview. This argument acknowledges that language is incredibly pervasive and that differences between different languages can have meaningful effects on their respective speakers' cognition, but language alone does not solely decide how a person thinks. One commonly cited example of linguistic relativity is that, while there are many languages with grammatical gender (German, Spanish, etc.), these languages do not classify all nouns as the same genders. For instance, the word for "bridge" in German is feminine and masculine in Spanish. But because of this difference in gender classification, a German speaker is more likely to use stereotypically feminine words like "elegant" and "beautiful" to describe a bridge whereas a Spanish speaker tends to use stereotypically masculine ones like "strong."^[1] Another example is that while many languages typically express spatial orientation with words like "left" and "right" or "front" and "back," many Australian Aboriginal languages only use the cardinal directions ("north," "south," etc.) In these languages, therefore, the speakers must always conceptualize and describe the location using compass points. The impact of language on perception can also be seen by how the lack of words to describe smells in English impacts English speakers’ ability to recognize different scents. In English, smells are described using comparisons (“It smells like cinnamon”). In Jahai (a language primarily spoken in Malaysia), there are words used solely to describe smells such as “crnir” which describes things that have been roasted. People that speak Jahai have been found to be better at identifying smells than people that speak English.^[2] With examples such as these, current linguists largely believe linguistic relativity to be true.^[3]