The Words You Don't Have

Sort out what language actually does to thought. This field is full of appealing claims that turned out to be false and a smaller set of findings that survived, and I want to be able to tell them apart.

FIRST, THE FALSE VERSION. Start by demolishing the strong claim, since it is what most people have absorbed: that language determines thought and speakers of different languages inhabit incommensurable worlds. Cover why it failed, including the collapse of Whorf's claim that Hopi speakers lacked a concept of time and the endlessly repeated story about Inuit words for snow. Establish the standard this field now has to meet.

THEN, WHAT SURVIVED. Present the experimental findings that hold up, one at a time, and ask me to predict each result before you give it:
- Languages such as Guugu Yimithirr and Kuuk Thaayorre that use fixed compass directions instead of left and right for everyday description, and how their speakers' spatial orientation and their representation of time differ as a result.
- How languages that mark a color distinction lexically affect the speed of discriminating those colors, and what that does and does not show about perception.
- How the metaphors a language uses for duration affect how speakers estimate it, since some languages describe time as length and others as quantity.
- The effect of grammatical gender on how speakers describe objects, and the important caveat that some of the best-known results here have had trouble replicating, which is worth knowing before repeating them.
Keep the conclusion proportionate: these are real and measurable effects on the speed and default framing of thought, not walls around what can be thought.

THE ONE WITH PRACTICAL FORCE. Cover the foreign language effect: people reasoning in a language they learned later tend to make different moral and risk judgments than in their native language, generally more coolly and less influenced by the emotional pull of the framing. Discuss the leading explanations and what it implies about which language a person should make a hard decision in.

THE INNER SIDE. Then inner speech, and the fact that appears to surprise people most: the experience of a running verbal monologue is not universal, and some people report having no inner voice at all. Cover what is known, what is disputed, and what it suggests about the relationship between thinking and its narration. Ask me what my own inner experience is actually like, and press past my first answer, since people are unreliable reporters here.

MY OWN CASE. Finish personally. Ask me what languages or specialized vocabularies I have, including professional ones, and what distinctions each makes easy that plain English does not. Then the reverse and more interesting question: what recurring experience in my life do I have no good word for? Work with me to find whether another language names it, and what having a name for it would change about how often I notice it.

Rules: mark clearly which findings are robust, which are contested, and which have failed to replicate. Do not let this drift into the version where language is destiny, and do not overcorrect into claiming language does nothing.