Linguistic relativity asks whether the specific language a person happens to speak actually shapes, in some measurable way, how they perceive and think about the world, beyond simply giving them different words to describe thoughts they'd otherwise have anyway. This idea has moved through genuinely different versions since it was first seriously proposed, from a strong claim that language fundamentally determines and constrains what thoughts a speaker can have at all, to a much weaker, more modest claim that language merely nudges certain habitual patterns of attention and categorisation without limiting what's thinkable.
The strong version claimed language sets hard limits on thought itself
The strongest early version of linguistic relativity held that a language's grammatical and vocabulary structure doesn't just describe a speaker's thoughts but actually determines and constrains which thoughts that speaker is capable of having in the first place, meaning a concept genuinely absent from a person's native language would be, in some meaningful sense, actually unthinkable to them, not merely harder to express. This strong deterministic version has been largely rejected by contemporary linguists and cognitive scientists, since people can and regularly do learn, express and reason about entirely new concepts that their native language previously had no dedicated word for, directly contradicting the idea that language sets a hard ceiling on what's thinkable.
A weaker, more defensible version still finds real, measurable effects
A considerably weaker, more modest version of linguistic relativity has fared much better against actual empirical testing: rather than claiming language determines what's thinkable, it holds that a language's specific structure can measurably influence habitual patterns of attention, memory and categorisation, even while leaving a speaker fully capable of thinking and communicating about anything regardless of whether their language has a dedicated word for it. Researchers have found real, if generally modest, effects along these lines, differences in how speakers of languages with different colour-naming systems categorise colours, for instance, without those differences ever amounting to genuinely different underlying thinking capacities.
What we're still unsure about
That the strong, deterministic version of linguistic relativity has been largely rejected, and that weaker versions have found real if modest supporting evidence in specific studied domains like colour perception, are well documented in contemporary cognitive linguistics research. What remains a genuinely active, ongoing research question is exactly how far these weaker linguistic effects actually extend beyond the specific, narrower domains researchers have most thoroughly studied, since demonstrating a real effect in one carefully controlled area, like colour categorisation, doesn't automatically establish how broadly or strongly similar effects apply across the much wider range of human thought and perception — researchers continue actively testing linguistic relativity's reach across new domains, without a single settled account yet of its overall scope.
This sits inside Language & Cognitive Linguistics, one of seven topics in Cognitive Psychology, one of four domains in Psychology, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.