Filipinos know the feeling when a joke said in Filipino loses its tone after being directly translated into English, often making fun of the translation for falling flat. Beyond cultural differences, language itself plays a major role in this phenomenon.
Yet humor is only one example. What begins as a seemingly ordinary communication issue may point to something much deeper about the workings of the human mind. Various studies suggest that language may influence how people perceive colors, understand time, navigate space, and conceptualize social relationships. For more than a century, linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have wrestled with this puzzle.
If language can shape so many aspects of human experience, a deceptively simple question emerges: do we merely use language to express our thoughts, or does language help construct them in the first place?
Which came first, thought or language?
At first glance, the answer may seem obvious. Many have struggled to put a thought or idea into words, suggesting that cognition is independent from language, waiting to be expressed rather than being formed by it.
This perspective has long been supported by other evidence, such as infants recognizing patterns, learning causal reasoning, and object permanence long before they learn to speak. Likewise, many animals, such as octopuses and different corvids, demonstrate high problem-solving capabilities despite lacking complex language similar to humans.
Yet many argue that language is not simply a medium for communication or a tool merely used to express existing thoughts. Rather, language in itself organizes, categorizes, and even shapes thoughts.
The idea gained prominence through the work of linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who proposed that the language people speak influences how they understand and perceive the world around them. Their theory, later known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, has been at the epicenter of the most enduring debates in cognitive science.
The debate today is less about whether thought can exist without language and more about how much language influences thought.
Language shapes thought?
Sapir and Whorf argued that a language’s structure affects how its speakers perceive and understand reality. This concept, later termed linguistic relativity, challenged the assumption that all humans experience the world in exactly the same way regardless of the language they speak.
The strongest version of the hypothesis, known as linguistic determinism, suggests that language determines thought and limits what people can meaningfully conceive. While provocative, this view eventually fell out of favor over the latter half of the 20th century as further studies debunked the claim.
Critics pointed out that humans are capable of imagining new ideas, understanding familiar concepts, and communicating experiences even when precise words are unavailable. The existence of visual thinking, abstract reasoning, and nonverbal cognition also suggests that thought is not entirely confined by language. However, dismissing linguistic determinism did not mean linguistic relativity was abandoned altogether.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky and her colleagues revived interest in linguistic relativity as their work suggested that speakers of different languages may conceptualize time, space, and causality differently.
One of Boroditsky’s most striking examples involves spatial orientation. While English speakers typically describe location using relative directions such as left and right, some Indigenous Australian languages rely almost exclusively on the cardinal directions north, south, east, and west. As a result, speakers constantly track their position in relation to their surroundings.
These findings do not suggest that speakers inhabit different realities. They instead propose that language acts as a cognitive lens that influences how experiences are organized and interpreted.
Thinking without words
Not all researchers are convinced that language plays as large a role in cognition as linguistic relativity suggests. While studies by Boroditsky and others demonstrate that language can influence how people categorize and attend to information, critics argue that such effects are often modest and shaped by factors beyond language itself, including culture, environment, and education.
Neuroscience blurs this picture further. While language relies on specialized regions of the brain, thought itself is distributed across multiple neural networks responsible for perception, emotion, memory, and reasoning, not confined to a single system. Even individuals with severe language impairments such as aphasia can often retain significant cognitive abilities.
For cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, these observations point to a simple conclusion: language may shape thought, but it does not create it. Today, many researchers reject both the notion that language determines reality and the idea that it is merely a passive communication tool. Instead, language is increasingly understood as one influence among many that help shape how humans think.
A lens, not a cage
So, do we think in language, or does language think for us? The answer may just be neither, perhaps a little bit of both.
Humans are clearly capable of thinking without words, yet language is far more than a passive tool for communicating our ideas and thoughts. It helps us organize our experiences, categorize the information we store, and direct attention toward certain aspects of the world around us.
Instead of determining thought, language may act as a lens through which thought is filtered. The languages we speak do not trap us within separate realities, but encourage us to notice different features defining the same one. A speaker’s perception of time, space, color, or even their social relationships can be subtly influenced by their own linguistic habits.
Perhaps this is why some jokes lose their punch in translation. Humor is not merely carried by words; it is shaped by the cultural meanings and patterns of thought embedded within them.
More than a century after Sapir and Whorf first posed the language question, the debate remains unresolved. Language does not think for us, nor do our thoughts exist entirely apart from it. Instead, language and thought appear to exist in constant dialogue, each shaping the other in ways researchers are still trying to understand.