Language limits what you can think.

The first main idea of this hypothesis is the linguistic relativism, a theory that claims that our language determines the things we can think and say. The linguistic relativism states that the language you speak determines the way that you interpret the world around you, in other words, people experience the world based on the grammatical structures they habitually use. A great example for it is that “speakers of different languages may see different numbers if bands in a rainbow”. It happens because actually rainbow is a continuum of color, there are no empirical stripes or bands, so people see as many bands of colors as their language possesses. That is, the words we possess determine the things that we can know.

The second main idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the linguistic realism. The linguistic realism is a theory that states that language merely influences your thoughts about the real world but does not determine what you think. The main proof that the language does not limit our though are the babies. When we born we are not able to speak but we are able to think and it is scientifically proven. Is that capacity of think that stimulates us to start speaking. Is the need of show our thoughts, I mean, our needs and wants that encourages us to communicate using language. So, the language starts of the necessity of express our thoughts.

So, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be used in different contexts. Yes, there are situations in which the language does limit your thought and consequently what you want to say like for example in the case of the rainbows, as showed before. But there are also situations in which this statement is not true, situations in which the language does not limit our though because it does not exist yet, for example with the babies in which the language born of the necessity of express their thoughts. So, to this days the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has not been completely disputed or defended, but has continued to intrigue researches around the world.