Did you know that there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world? Yes, they are, and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures.
There are relationships between language and our thought. They shape the way we think, indeed. Let’s listen to cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky’s TED talk. She shares examples of language — from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian — that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. This confirms the Sapir-Whorfian hypothesis.
“The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,” Boroditsky says. “Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.” So, one language equals one universe.