Lecture : la langue façonne-t-elle la pensée ?

bilingual — דו־לשוני, מי שמדבר שתי שפות. Russian — רוסית. Amharic — אמהרית. shade — כאן: גוון של צבע. claim — טענה. Benjamin Lee Whorf — בנג׳מין לי וורף, חוקר שפה אמריקאי.

For centuries, people have wondered whether speakers of different languages see the world in different ways. In the 1930s, the thinker Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that language does not simply express our thoughts but actually shapes them. His strongest claims, for example that people whose language had no words for time could not think about time in the usual way, were later rejected by most researchers. Yet the question itself did not disappear.

Modern studies suggest a more careful answer: language does not limit what we are able to think, but it may influence what we notice and remember. Colour offers a well-known example. Russian has two separate basic words for light blue and dark blue, while English has only one. In one experiment, Russian speakers were slightly faster than English speakers at telling apart two shades of blue when one shade was "light blue" and the other "dark blue" in Russian. The difference was small, but it was real.

Direction offers another example. Some languages hardly use words like "left" and "right" at all. Speakers of certain languages in northern Australia describe positions using north, south, east and west, even for objects on a table: they might say, "Move your cup a little to the east." Researchers have found that speakers of such languages are usually very good at knowing which direction they are facing, even in unfamiliar places.

What about people who speak more than one language? Experiments show that in bilingual speakers, both languages are active at the same time, even when only one of them is being used, so the brain must constantly choose between them. Some researchers believed that this daily practice gives bilinguals an advantage in skills such as paying attention and switching between tasks. However, later studies have produced mixed results, and many scientists now think that the advantage, if it exists at all, is smaller than was once claimed.

Bilingual people themselves often report feeling slightly different in each language, more serious in one and more relaxed or funny in another. This may have less to do with grammar than with experience: we usually use each language with different people and in different situations.

So, does language shape thought? The most honest answer seems to be "a little, in some areas." A language is not a prison that stops us from thinking certain thoughts. It is more like a pair of glasses that makes some details easier to see. For the many people in Israel who move between Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English or Amharic every day, that is a question worth thinking about, in any language.