Determinism and relativism are linguistic theories developed by Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir. These suggest that there is a particular relationship between a language and the way its speakers are inclined to think about the world.
Determinism is the stronger belief, basically stating that if you can’t talk about it, you cannot comprehend it, while relativism is milder.
Strong Hypothesis (Determinism)#card
We perceive only what our language allows us to.
We are slaves to the words available to us
This theory has been widely discredited, example is the Hopi tribe who only have 2 colours in their language but were able to learn all the English words for colour relatively easily. Further is the example of the word schadenfreude, which people started using because they didn’t have a word for it in English (well they did - epicaricacy - but that’s besides the point), which proves that people must have been able to think of the idea before they named it.
Weak Hypothesis (Relativism)
Relativism is a slightly weaker take, which states that our language does impact the way we act in certain scenarios.
There was an experiment done, where Russians who have two words for light and dark blue (Goluboy and Siniy) were able to better identify colours than English speakers. This confirms language affects performance at least on simple conceptual colour tasks.
An example of this is in Cape York, where the Pormpuraaw, a small aboriginal community lives. These people talk about space in terms of cardinal directions, north south east and west, for everything rather than our relative lefts and rights, “there’s an ant on your southeast leg”. This results in a profound ability to stay oriented, because everything is absolute.
People in this tribe also use this for their perception of time. For example, they always arranged temporal objects in the order of east to west, so that they would change based on the direction they are facing.