There was an idea in linguistics that the language you speak determines what you can think. That is, if your language has no word for a concept, that concept is unavailable to you.

This idea has been more or less dead in linguistics for decades. But it’s had a strange afterlife in the wider world.

This idea goes by the name of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But the name is misleading: the two linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored a paper. In fact, the term was coined after both were dead, by a third linguist.

Nevertheless, the name has stuck.

There are two versions of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the strong version says language determines what you can think.

The weak version says language merely affects what you think. For example, it might make you slightly faster at distinguishing colours, or bias how you remember spatial arrangements.

The weak version has real evidence behind it. The strong version does not.

Here’s what the weak version looks like in practice. Russian has two basic words for blue: siniy (dark) and goluboy (light). Russian speakers distinguish shades across that boundary faster than English speakers do.

But if you give Russian speakers a verbal task that occupies the language centres of the brain while they’re distinguishing colours, the advantage vanishes completely. This is evidence that the (slight) Russian superpower comes from language.

There’s lots of evidence for the weak version, and yet it’s the strong version that has lived on in the public mind.

So why won't the strong, wrong version die?

Today’s article is my attempt to answer that question.