Worldview and language influence each other

It is clear that language and worldview are interrelated to some degree. The more interesting question then becomes does language influence worldview or did a people’s worldview influence their language? This becomes a chicken and egg question. A prominent current contributor to the theory of linguistic relativity is Professor Lera Boroditsky. She believes that the next step is to determine if “it is culture that shapes thought which language only conveys, or if it is language itself that does the shaping”.^[1] Professor Betty Birner thinks it seems likely that both language and worldview reciprocally influence each other. One of the examples that linguist Benjamin Whorf cited to support his argument that language impacts perception was how the Hopi people think about time differently because they don’t have terms about breaking time into chunks (days, hours, minutes…). To them time is continuous. However, this correlation doesn’t mean that our language shapes our view of time. It could also mean that our view of time shaped each language or that each culture shapes both the way people think and the way they talk.^[2]