This idea has been looked at by mainstream psychologists and sociologists for decades. This
New York Times article relates the thought back to a 1940s article. That article and the popular novel 1984 (published in 1949) are likely the two primary sources of our popular understanding of this phenomenon.
I particularly liked one bit of that article:
Guy Deutscher, NY Times wrote:Since there is no evidence that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
The example it uses is that in English we don't use masculine/feminine words, but many languages do. So if I say "I met a friend yesterday." I don't have to tell you if they were a male or female friend. In French, however, I would say "J'ai rencontré avec un ami hier." Now you know they were a male friend. When I think about the situation in French I have to consider that when I speak. This does not mean, however, that the French have a stronger sense of gender in relationships. On the contrary, most Americans I know consider the gender of their friends when spending time with them. But they don't have to for them to speak correctly or to think about the situation in English.
From my understanding there are mixed opinions but I believe most say that, in general, our language does not limit our potential for thought. However, given that culture and language grew up together, our cultural values get imposed on our language. In many cultures it is not proper to use the word "no" directly. It's just rude. In English, however, we are taught to use this word and to be direct "No means no" and other such phrases come to us from our culture. And the thing is: our language attempts to be a reflection of our thoughts. It is our attempt to relay our thoughts to others. If you have ever tried to search for words to explain something then you understand that while language may not impact your ability to think it definitely impacts your ability to tell others what you are thinking.
An article in Scientific American comes to this conclusion:
Lera Boroditsky wrote:But how do we know whether differences in language create differences in thought, or the other way around? The answer, it turns out, is both — the way we think influences the way we speak, but the influence also goes the other way... Studies have shown that changing how people talk changes how they think. Teaching people new color words, for instance, changes their ability to discriminate colors. And teaching people a new way of talking about time gives them a new way of thinking about it.
But I would argue that it isn't really the new words themselves that give people these thoughts. It is the thoughts behind the words they are being introduced to and their newfound ability to relay thoughts they may have already had, but were previously unable to speak about, that gives them these seemingly new thoughts. For example, I would never have thought about
this color by relating it to kaya wood before I studied go. I would have just called it gold or maybe wheat colored. But learning something new gave me something new to say about that color.
Most evidence presented for or against this idea is anecdotal and until we have an objective way to measure thought patterns inside the human brain we can't say anything objective about how language impacts thought because all we know about another's thoughts comes from their language (be it spoken, written, or body language).
