Perspective in Language

optional Theme - Language

Does the language you speak shape what you can know?

THE PROVOCATION

Read this carefully. What happened at the meeting?

"Language is power, life and the instrument of culture,

the instrument of domination and liberation." - Angela Carter

Even if you speak English as your first language it is not certain that you will understand what happened at the meeting. I wrote it and I 'know' what it means. The problem isn't the words, few of which should cause you problems. The problem is the idioms: fixed phrases whose meaning has become conventionalised and can no longer be derived from the literal sense of the words. "Not cricket," "sticky wicket," "hit for six," "good innings," "stumped," "straight bat" etc. - a fluent English speaker (of a certain age, class and gender) processes these as single units of meaning. They are all derived from the game of cricket. But in their use in the business context, the cricket image is gone. The phrase just means what it means.

Why is English business language saturated with cricket metaphors rather than football ones? The explanation is historical. Cricket was the game of the English ruling class and, later, of the British Empire. It was exported to India, the Caribbean, Australia, and South Africa alongside administration, trade, and colonial governance. The language of fair play, good innings, and sticky wickets migrated from the pitch into boardrooms, courtrooms, and parliaments.

Elite English professional life still speaks in the idiom of a nineteenth-century gentleman's sport - and most of its speakers never notice. That is the argument of this section in miniature. Language carries power quietly, in structures so familiar they become invisible. By the way, one phrase in the passage is the odd one out: "stepped up to the plate." That is baseball - American English. It is a reminder that the dominant metaphor base is no longer purely British. Power shifts, and the language shifts with it.

Big idea 1 - Does the language you speak shape what you can think?

In 1929, the American linguist Edward Sapir wrote: "We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation." His student Benjamin Lee Whorf developed this into what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity: the idea that the language you speak influences - or even determines - how you perceive the world.

The strong version of the hypothesis claims that language determines thought: that you cannot think a thought for which your language has no structure. This version is now largely rejected. No serious linguist believes that speakers of languages without a future tense are literally unable to think about tomorrow.

The weak version is more defensible and considerably more interesting. It claims that language habitually directs attention - that the categories your language forces you to mark will affect what you notice, remember, and reason about. The evidence for this is substantial. The psychologist Lera Boroditsky has produced some of the most compelling. Russian has two obligatory words for blue: siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue). Russian speakers are measurably faster at distinguishing these shades than English speakers - but only when the shades fall across the grammatical boundary. When both shades fall within the same category, the advantage disappears.

A more striking case comes from spatial reasoning. Most European languages describe space relative to the speaker's body: left, right, in front, behind. The Aboriginal Australian language Kuuk Thaayorre uses absolute compass directions instead - north, south, east, west - for everything, including describing objects on a table. Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre develop extraordinary spatial awareness; they always know where north is, in any room, at any time. English speakers, asked to point north in an unfamiliar room, are often simply wrong.

English speakers, shown a video of someone knocking over a vase accidentally, tend to say "Sally broke the vase" - assigning agency even when none was intended. Speakers of Spanish and Japanese are more likely to say "the vase broke" or "the vase fell." When tested later on who caused the accident, English speakers are more likely to assign blame and to remember the person responsible. The language shaped what they remembered, not only how they described it.

How Language Shapes the Way We Think
TED

Linguist Lera Boroditsky argues that language is not just a tool for expressing thoughts, but a force that shapes them. Cross-linguistic studies show how grammar and vocabulary influence perception of time, space, colour, and responsibility. Even simple linguistic habits can guide attention and decision-making. Language therefore subtly channels cognition, without fully determining it, highlighting both diversity and shared human thinking. This has implications for learning, culture, and communication.

Big idea 2 - Metaphor is the structure of thought.

In 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, one of the most influential books in cognitive linguistics. Their central claim was that most of our abstract reasoning is structured by metaphors we do not notice - that conceptual metaphors are not decorative but foundational.

Consider how English speakers talk about argument. We speak of attacking positions, defending claims, shooting down ideas, marshalling evidence, and winning or losing a debate. English speakers think of argument as war, and the metaphor structures how we approach disagreement, what we count as success, and what moves are available to us. It is not that argument resembles war and language reflects the resemblance. The metaphor came first and the reasoning followed.

Lakoff and Johnson call this a "conceptual metaphor." Other examples: time is money (you spend it, waste it, save it, invest it, run out of it - even though time is not a finite resource you own). Ideas are food (you digest them, find them hard to swallow, chew them over, or find them half-baked).

Each of these metaphors makes certain inferences natural and others invisible. If time is money, it follows that wasting it is irresponsible. If argument is war, it follows that there must be a winner. Neither of these conclusions is obvious from the nature of time or argument - they are imported by the metaphor.

The meeting passage at the top of this page is an illustration of exactly this point. A reader who knows cricket processes the expressions instantly and fluently without pausing on any of them. A reader who does not know cricket finds the passage opaque. The conceptual framework - sport as a model for professional conflict - is invisible to those inside it and impenetrable to those outside. Abraham Maslow captured the same idea with a simpler example: if your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. The framework you have available shapes what you can see.

Lakoff and Johnson ask what would happen if argument were structured not by war but by collaborative building. You would not attack positions - you would add to structures. You would not shoot down ideas - you would test whether they are strong. They argue that the reasoning itself would change.

How metaphors shape the way you see the world
BBC Ideas

BBC Ideas video explains that metaphors are not just poetic flourishes but shape how we think, feel, and act. Defined simply as understanding one thing in terms of another, they structure ideas about time, emotion, and society. George Lakoff shows how “orientational” metaphors guide perception, while studies reveal metaphors influence opinions on issues like crime and illness. Because they frame reality, metaphors can shape beliefs, politics, and behaviour—making them powerful tools that subtly influence everyday understanding.

The cricket expressions in the passage are not quite active metaphors in Lakoff's sense. "Stumped," "sticky wicket," "not cricket," "hit for six" - these are idioms. The original cricket image has largely faded. A fluent English speaker processes them as single units of meaning without picturing a cricket pitch. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," gave a name to exactly this phenomenon: dying metaphors. Orwell described them as phrases that have lost their original vividness, used automatically, without the writer registering either the original picture or a fresh thought. His concern was epistemic: when you use a ready-made phrase, you stop thinking. The idiom does the cognitive work and the mind disengages. Language that runs on automatic produces thought that runs on automatic - and automatic thought is precisely what allows atrocities to be administered without being felt.

The cricket passage illustrates both dangers at once. The idiomatic automatism Orwell describes - the way dying metaphors let you communicate without thinking - is exactly what makes the passage's class history invisible. Speakers deploy "sticky wicket" and "good innings" without asking where those phrases came from or whose culture they encode. Dead metaphors - naturalised idioms - can embed the assumptions of a ruling class so completely that the language feels neutral, inevitable, and universal. This is one of the mechanisms by which power reproduces itself without making itself known: built into the structure of the language, and therefore invisible to anyone who learned that language as a child.

Big idea 3 - The language of power - and the power of language.

The Norman Conquest of 1066 left a trace in English that is still visible today. Anglo-Saxon peasants looked after the animals and gave them their Germanic names: pig, cow, sheep, calf, deer, fowl. Norman lords ate the food and named the dishes in French: pork, beef, mutton, veal, venison, pullet. The ruling class named what it consumed; the serving class named what it raised. The linguistic divide encoded a social one, and it has never fully healed. English still carries this double vocabulary - the blunt Saxon words for labour and soil, the elevated French words for culture and cuisine.

Walter Scott was the first person to write this observation down systematically - in the opening chapter of Ivanhoe (1820), where the jester Wamba makes exactly this joke.

“...the swine is called swine when it is under the charge of a Saxon slave, but becomes pork when it is carried to the castle hall to feast among the nobles; the calf is calf while it needs tending, but becomes veal when it is set on the table; the ox is ox while it labours in the field, but becomes beef when it is slaughtered; and the deer is deer when it runs wild in the forest, but becomes venison when it is served up at the banquet.”

George Orwell made the political argument most sharply. In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," he showed how the bureaucratic register of political writing - Latinate vocabulary, passive constructions, and abstract nouns where plain ones would do - serves to obscure rather than communicate. Phrases like "pacification of native populations" or "transfer of populations" make actions that would be plainly described in simpler language easier to perform and harder to object to. Orwell's rule was: never use a long word where a short one will do, and never use the passive where you can use the active. The rule is aesthetic, but the motivation is epistemic; obscure language produces obscure thought.

The American comedian George Carlin made the same argument through a different example. He traced the evolution of the term for what soldiers experience in combat: "shell shock" (two syllables, immediate, physical) became "battle fatigue" after the Second World War, then "operational exhaustion," and finally "post-traumatic stress disorder" - four words, eight syllables, entirely clinical. The argument is an epistemic one, not just a comic one. Each step in this progression made the condition easier to administer and harder to feel.

George Carlin
(1937 - 2008)

George Carlin was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and social critic whose work attacked authority, consumerism, and especially language. He argued euphemisms obscure reality and blunt moral awareness, famously tracing “shell shock” to “post-traumatic stress disorder” to show how softer phrasing distances us from suffering. For Carlin, bureaucratic language sanitises violence and reduces accountability; reclaiming plain, direct speech is essential to clear thinking and resistance.

In your lesson you will also have seen the evolution of gendered professional titles: stewardess to flight attendant, fireman to firefighter, chairman to chairperson. When I was young the person who held the bat in cricket was a 'batsman', now they are the 'batter'. To my ear it simply sounds wrong, too American, but I accept it is a good thing nonetheless. These changes work in the opposite direction from Orwell's dying metaphors - language adjusted to reflect a widened view of who can hold a role. It raises a mirror-image question: when language changes to reflect a different view of who belongs somewhere, does the knowledge change, or only its communication?

As you will have studied in your English lessons, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion makes this argument through a character. Eliza Doolittle is a Covent Garden flower seller who, under the instruction of phonetician Henry Higgins, acquires the accent and vocabulary of the English upper class. Shaw's argument - sharper than the musical version tends to suggest - is that Eliza acquires a new social identity through language. The accent and vocabulary reshape how she is perceived, how she is treated, and how she comes to understand herself. Read as a TOK text rather than a literary one, the play argues that the words you have access to, and the accent in which you deliver them, are constitutive of your place in society. Using the cricket idioms is not enough; you also have to speak them with the right accent. I used to have a Cardiff accent and lost it at university. Why do you think that was?

Bringing it together

The sign is arbitrary.

In 1916, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that the linguistic sign is made up of two inseparable parts: the signifier (the sound-image, the word itself) and the signified (the concept it refers to). His central claim was that the relationship between them is arbitrary. There is nothing in the concept of a dog that requires the sound "dog." The same animal is chien in French, Hund in German, perro in Spanish, cane in Italian. None of these is more natural or correct than any other. The connection is a convention - agreed within a community, maintained by use, and invisible until someone points it out to you.

This is the insight that runs beneath everything on this page. If the sign is arbitrary - if the word is attached to the world by convention rather than necessity - then different languages are free to carve up reality differently. That is the premise of Sapir-Whorf, the reason Russian can have two words for blue where English has one, and why the Norman Conquest could replace Saxon animal names with French food names and leave a class structure embedded in the vocabulary. Orwell's dying metaphors are dangerous for exactly the same reason: phrases that feel inevitable and natural are in fact conventions - chosen, not given, and therefore capable of encoding the interests of whoever first fixed them in place.

Most students reading this page speak more than one language. They know Saussure's point not as theory but as experience. A bilingual speaker learns in childhood that the word is detachable from the thing - that "dog" and "chien" refer to the same animal through entirely different sounds. This is, as George Steiner observed, a philosophically liberating insight: it means you understand from an early age that your language is a system, not a mirror. A bilingual speaker has at least two ways of saying the world - and, the evidence suggests, two different ways of reasoning about it. The "foreign language effect," described by Boaz Keysar and colleagues, found that people make more consistently rational decisions in their second language than in their first. The explanation is that L2 processing is more deliberate and less emotionally automatic - closer to Kahneman's System 2 than System 1.

The question that runs through this section - does language shape knowledge? - is one you can test from the inside. Is there something you can think or express in one of your languages that you cannot in another - not just a missing word, but a way of framing or a register that resists translation? If the answer is yes, even once, that is evidence for the weak Whorf position. And if you are reading this page in a language that is not your first, you may already be experiencing the foreign language effect.

Next: Optional Theme 1: Language - Methods and Tools.

Questions, assessments, films and other stuff.

Questions to think about

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has a strong version (language determines thought) and a weak version (language influences thought). Most evidence supports the weak version. But if even influence is real, does this mean that knowledge claims made in one language and evaluated in another are being assessed by a different cognitive instrument?
The cricket passage at the top of this page worked on you before you noticed it. If conceptual metaphors operate below the level of conscious attention, can they be identified and corrected - or does identifying them just replace one invisible framework with another
George Carlin shows that "shell shock" becomes easier to administer as it becomes harder to feel. If changing the label changes the emotional force of a claim, does it change the knowledge - or only the communication of it? Is there a difference?
The Norman Conquest left English with two parallel vocabularies. English speakers are largely unaware of this history. Does knowing it change anything about how you use the language? Can historical knowledge about language alter current perception?
Your lesson is conducted in English. Most of the philosophical tradition you draw on was written in English, German, French, and ancient Greek. Does the language of philosophical inquiry shape the questions philosophy asks - and the answers it finds plausible?
When "stewardess" became "flight attendant," language changed to reflect a different view of who can hold a role. When "shell shock" became "post-traumatic stress disorder," language changed to make a condition easier to process administratively. Both are linguistic changes driven by power. Are they the same kind of change epistemically?
You speak more than one language. Is there something you can think or feel in one that you cannot in another - not just a word, but a way of framing or a tone? If yes, what does that suggest about the limits of translation as a method of sharing knowledge?

Exhibition connections
See more exhibition ideas and previous student work here

It is never too early to start to think about your TOK Exhibition, the ideas in this lesson connect strongly to four of the 35 prompts. Start noticing objects in the world around you that speak to these questions.

Prompt #12: Is bias inevitable in the production of knowledge?

Suggested object: a newspaper article or political speech that uses framing language - passive constructions, abstract nouns, euphemisms - to describe an event. The TOK argument draws on Orwell: the linguistic choices made in producing knowledge (passive voice, Latinate vocabulary, euphemism) systematically obscure agency and consequence, making bias structural rather than incidental. The exhibition argument needs to show how the specific language of your object shapes what the reader is invited to know.

Prompt #20: What is the relationship between personal experience and knowledge?

Suggested object: a personal artefact that exists in two languages - a bilingual dictionary, a letter or journal entry in a language other than English, a translation of a poem where something is lost. The multilingual experience is direct personal evidence for the weak Whorf position: that different languages encode experience differently. The TOK argument asks what kind of knowledge comes from inhabiting more than one linguistic framework - and whether that constitutes a distinct form of knowing unavailable to monolingual speakers.

Prompt #24: How might the context in which knowledge is presented influence whether it is accepted or rejected?

Suggested object: two accounts of the same event using different registers - a clinical report and a personal testimony, or a political speech and a journalist's account of the same policy. The Carlin example (shell shock to PTSD) is the model: the same underlying knowledge can be accepted, dismissed, or never considered depending on the language in which it is presented. The exhibition argument connects linguistic framing directly to epistemic reception.

Prompt #33: How is current knowledge shaped by its historical development?

Suggested object: an English word, phrase, or text whose etymology reveals its historical power relations - a menu, a legal document, a set of professional titles. The Saxon/French divide that the Norman Conquest left in English is an active feature of contemporary vocabulary: it shapes who sounds educated, whose language is "standard," and whose is marked as regional or low-status. The exhibition argument connects the 1066 conquest to a present-day knowledge claim.

Feature films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — Arrival (2016)

Denis Villeneuve

The strongest cinematic argument for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and in my top 10 TOK movies. Linguist Louise Banks learns the heptapod written language - a non-linear system in which signs express complete thoughts independent of time sequence - and her own perception of time begins to change. Watch for the scene where she realises she is not remembering her daughter but anticipating her: the language has restructured her cognition rather than simply giving her new words. The question it leaves: if the strong version of Whorf is even partially true, is that liberating or terrifying? My students can watch the film here.

🎬 WATCH — Pygmalian (1981)

BBCTV

Shaw's argument is that accent and vocabulary do not merely signal class - they constitute it. Eliza Doolittle does not learn to disguise herself as upper-class; she acquires an identity. The 1981 film keeps the argument closer to the surface than the musical version 'My Fair Lady`. If you have studied the play in English class, watch the film as a TOK text rather than a literary one: what exactly changes when Eliza's language changes, and who controls the process? The question it leaves: if language shapes identity as well as thought, who has the right to change it?