Does a Second Language Change How You Think?

[A] The claim that the language you speak shapes the thought you are capable of has an awkward history. [B] In its strong form it was abandoned decades ago, because it predicts that speakers of one language should be unable to entertain ideas that speakers of another find ordinary, and no such barrier has been found. [C] What survived is smaller and better evidenced. Languages differ in what they oblige a speaker to specify, and an obligation is not the same as a limit. [D]

The experimental results follow that distinction closely: speakers of languages that mark the direction of motion attend to direction more readily in a task given without words, and speakers whose language assigns grammatical gender describe an object with adjectives that match the gender in their own language and not in another. These effects are real, repeatable and modest, and they mostly disappear when the task itself involves language the participant is not speaking. What they show is not that thought is imprisoned but that habitual attention is cheap to shift and expensive to maintain. Reporting them as evidence that a language builds a world is a misdescription that the researchers themselves rarely make and that survives in the popular account regardless.