Does Language Build the World You See?

From the reading: Does Language Build the World You See?

Roughly 7,000 languages are spoken on Earth today, and each one carves up reality slightly differently. In 1931, the American linguist Edward Sapir proposed something radical: that the language a person speaks does not merely describe their world but actively shapes the conceptual framework through which they perceive it. His student Benjamin Lee Whorf extended the claim further, insisting that grammar itself encodes a particular way of seeing — what philosophers later called a Weltanschauung, or world-view. The resulting Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been debated, discredited, partially rehabilitated, and perpetually refined for nearly a century. What modern cognitive science now suggests is that the truth lies somewhere between the strong and weak versions of the theory — and that the exact location of that boundary matters enormously.