Linguistics FAQ

many centuries.” Things get even more complicated when you try to communicate with someone who grew up speaking a different language from yours. Then you get into linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a person’s native language influences how they see or experience the world.

But according to a growing body of evidence, the decline in the rate of language learning around age 18 is not a feature of our biology. It’s a bug in our education.

the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Essentially, this is the idea that the structure of a language determines a native speaker’s thinking.5