Does the language we speak shape the way we think?
This week I have been looking a bit into whether language(s) we speak, shape the way we think? Being raised up bi-lingual from the age of 8, where I spoke mostly Bosnian and Norwegian with a good addition of English, this is quite an interesting topic for me personally. Inspired by a talk from Lera Boroditsky from TEDWomen 2017, who had done a lot of experiments on this, here is what I found out. If you find this interesting, I encourage you to take a look at the presentation, many examples that I mention here are taken from her talk. 7000 languages, different way of thinking? There are about 7000 languages, each different from one another, in many ways, different sounds, different vocabularies, not at least different structures, to mention a few differences. Whether a language affect how we think has been debated throughout the centuries. "To have a second language is to have a second soul", stated Charlemagne, which is quite a bold statement suggesting that language is ...