Socio-linguistics

Benjamin Whorf was born in Massachusetts in 1897 and died in 1941.  He was the pioneer of Socio-linguistics, the understanding that our language affects the way we think.  He considered linguistics was essentially the quest for meaning.  He saw linguistics lighting the 'thick darkness of language' and consequently shedding light on much of the thought, culture and outlook on life of a given community.

Whilst some may not accept the 'Whorf-Sapir hypothesis'.  His ideas certainly make a lot of sense to anyone who is fluent in divergent languages.

A good example of the 'language wiring' that affects the way we see reality, is the either/or concept in English.  The tendency to classify people, things, ideas etc, as one thing or the other (from the simplistic young or old, fat or thin, to more complex either/or categories such as right-wing or left wing, etc,).

Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate sytematizations of his own language - shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language - in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vcast pattern system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personaility not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship or phenomena, chanels his reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.

......"thinking in language" does not necessarily have to use words. An uncultivated Choctaw can as easily as the most skilled litterateur contrast the tenses or the genders of two experiences, though he has never heard of any WORDS like "tense" or " gender for such contrasts. Much thinking never brings in words at all, but manipulates whole paradigms, word classes, and such grammatical orders "behind" and "above" the focus of personal consciousness.

thinking...follows a network of tracks laid down in the given language, an organisation which may concentrate systematically upon certain phases of reality, certain aspects of intelligence, and may systematically discard others featured by other languages.  The individual is utterly unaware of this organisation and is constrained completely within its unbreakable bonds.

(excerpts from Benjamin Whorf - Language, Thought, and Reality)