By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
According to lore, when Victor Hugo wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling, he sent his publisher a telegram consisting of a single character: ‘?’
The publisher replied: ‘!’
Two punctuation marks had been able to carry an entire conversation—because they could lean on shared knowledge and expectations.
Much of our communication works like that.
Suppose I am hosting a dinner party at 7pm. At 4pm, one of my guests texts me, ‘I’m free from 6pm.’ From that, I will understand, ‘I’m free from 6pm, and I’d like to arrive early if that’s OK?’
As the evening progresses, another of the guests says something horribly rude. I respond with, ‘So, what did you all think about the fish?’ From this, my guest ought to understand that he has overstepped the mark.
As a writer, I am acutely aware that I am conveying much more than the words on the page. As a psychiatrist, I am acutely aware that my patients are disclosing much more than the face value of their words.
So, how exactly do our words and sentences achieve so much?
The Theory of Implicature
The Oxford classicist and philosopher Paul Grice (d. 1988) attempted to answer this question with his theory of implicature.
Grice distinguished conventional implicatures, inherent in certain words such as ‘but’, ‘therefore’, and ‘indeed’, from conversational implicatures, which arise from a sort of game-playing, and rule-observing, between speakers.
Let me give you an example of each.
If I say, ‘She was poor but honest’, I am, by the simple use of the word ‘but’, also conveying or betraying a certain prejudice that poor people are generally dishonest.
A few hours before my dinner party, I bump into a friend while stepping out of a bakery with three loaves under my arm. My friend asks, ‘How are you?’ To which I respond, ‘Dinner party tonight!’ By which she understands, ‘I’m excited and rather busy preparing for the dinner party I’m hosting tonight—and so may not have time to chat.’ That’s at least three separate things.
With conversational implicatures, our utterances can take on added meanings, or different meanings, according to the situation or context in which they are uttered.
When we speak to our partner in a crowded place, they are able to derive much more meaning from what we are saying than the strangers who are also in earshot, in part because they are leaning upon background information known only to the both of us. Our partner is capturing not only our words, but also how they work with or wrap around the world that we have in common. Like a compression algorithm, conversation can dispense with whatever information the receiver is already able to reconstruct. The more we know about each other, the less we need to say.
More interesting, I think, is that non-literal meaning can also be created by pushing against certain general and deeply ingrained principles of communication and co-operation, shared even with strangers.
In particular, meaningful conversation can only take place on the assumption that the speakers are, at least on an epistemic level, cooperating with one another.
Grice divided this so-called cooperative principle into four maxims of conversation:
Maxim of quality: That utterances ought to be sincere, justified, and truthful.
Maxim of quantity: That the right amount of information ought to be provided.
Maxim of relevance: That the information provided is in some way pertinent.
Maxim of manner: That the information provided is as clear and unambiguous as possible.
Whenever one or more of these maxims appears to have been flouted, we reflexively assume that the speaker must somehow have observed the maxims and start searching for a likely non-literal meaning.
After my dinner party, I ask one of my guests, ‘How did you like the dinner?’ and she replies, ‘The conversation was stimulating.’ My friend has apparently failed to answer my question. But because I assume that she is cooperating with me, this failure becomes informative: she has politely and indirectly answered my cooking, while also telling me what she thought of the company.
In other words, implicature arises when the Gricean maxims are flouted, or would have been flouted had it not been for the implicature.
We are, in effect, pushing against expectations to save on words. The speaker need not transmit the entire meaning because the listener already possesses most of the apparatus required to reconstruct it. As a writer, I try not to underestimate your reconstructive machinery—because if I do, I risk becoming literal and boring.
Playing with Meaning
Common examples of floutings that, by implicature, are not true floutings include irony (maxim of quality), metaphor (maxim of relevance), and euphemism (maxim of manner). And some jokes as well. When my neighbour arrives late—from next door—to my dinner party, she exclaims: ‘Sorry, the traffic was really bad!’ Once we notice the gap between what is said and what is meant, we begin to see it everywhere.
Flirting is especially dependent upon this ambiguity. ‘Are you staying for another drink?’ can be nothing more than a question about another drink—or not. The advantage is precisely that neither party need decide, at least not yet, which meaning is intended. If the invitation is declined, both can retreat into the literal meaning without embarrassment.
This possibility of retreat gives rise to one of the great uses—and abuses—of implicature: plausible deniability. The diplomat, politician, seducer, passive-aggressive friend or relative, or social media troll can all communicate something without assuming full responsibility for having communicated it. ‘I never said that’ may be literally true, but entirely disingenuous.
At its darkest, implicature can become the political dog-whistle: an expression innocuous enough to one audience but freighted with additional meaning for another. The speaker communicates on two levels at once, while the ambiguity itself provides cover.
The maxims can also be flouted in a genuinely non-cooperative way. Thus, politicians often answer a different question to the one asked, or provide a much longer answer when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed, or been preferable. In such cases, most of the interviewer’s interjections are, in effect, attempts to return the politician to the maxims. In ordinary life, we might do much the same when we don’t know the answer to a question, but are too embarrassed to admit it.
Conversational implicatures serve a number of important functions such as: increasing the efficiency of communication; making communication more lively, varied, and humorous; and introducing ambiguity or restraint to avoid being ostracised or otherwise penalised for speaking hard truths.
But this slipperiness, this malleability, also gives rise to a number of ethical and legal problems—which is why legal contracts, witness statements, and the like are expected or even required to be as concrete and literal as possible.
More fundamentally, while we can be held responsible for what we say, to what extent can we be held responsible for what we implicate?
The same leaning on context that enables a bad actor to insinuate without admitting also enables friends to joke, lovers to flirt, diplomats to negotiate, and all of us to communicate far more economically and effectively than if we had to spell everything out. Meaning is not contained in words alone, but arises between words, expectations, and circumstances. Language is not merely the transmission of meaning from one mind to another. It is the art of sparking another mind to reconstruct meaning for itself.
John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831).
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Einstein held that imagination is more important than knowledge: ‘I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’
What Is Imagination?
Imagination is the faculty of the mind that forms and manipulates images, propositions, concepts, emotions, and sensations above and beyond and sometimes independently of incoming sensory stimuli, opening up the realms of the abstract, the figurative, the possible, the hypothetical, and the universal.
Imagination comes in many forms and by many degrees, ranging from scientific reasoning to musical appreciation, and overlaps with a number of other cognitive constructs including belief, desire, emotion, memory, supposition, and fantasy. Belief, like perception, aims at according with reality, while desire aims at altering reality. Like belief, emotion also aims at according with reality, but more particularly at reflecting the significance of its object, or class of object, for the subject—an aspect that it shares with many forms of imagination. Like imagination, memory can involve remote imagery. But unlike imagination, memory is (or aims to be) rooted in reality and serves primarily to frame belief and guide moment-by-moment action. Memories are often more vivid than imaginings, which are, in turn, more vivid than mere suppositions. Suppositions tend to be cold and cognitive, lacking the emotional and existential dimensions of imagination, and much of its vividness. Finally, fantasy may be understood as imagination directed towards the improbable.
I say the improbable rather than the impossible, because there is a theory that, just as perception justifies beliefs about actuality, so imagination justifies beliefs about possibility (or at least, metaphysical as opposed to natural possibility). To quote David Hume, ‘it is an established maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible.’
Could ghosts, the devil, time travel, and other imaginary things really be possible? I think inconceivability may be a better guide to impossibility than conceivability to possibility. But what does it mean for something to be conceivable or inconceivable, and by whom? It is easy to conceive of something other than oxygen in the place of oxygen, if one does not know anything about oxygen. In that much, knowledge and science constrain imagination—although, no doubt, they also help to focus it. The interplay between knowledge and imagination is most problematic when the ‘knowledge’ is wrong.
In any case, until very recently, most human societies did not mark a strict divide between imagination and belief, or fiction and reality, with each one informing and enriching the other. In fact, it could be argued that, in many important respects, the fiction took precedence over the reality—and even that this has been, and no doubt still is, one of the hallmarks of Homo sapiens. Today, there are pills for people who confuse imaginings and beliefs, but back in the day no one ever thought that life, despite its much harder hardships, might be meaningless—which I think tells us quite a bit about imagination and its uses, and also, incidentally, about mental illness and its causes.
Imagination and Meaning
The uses of imagination are many, more than I can enumerate. Most children begin to develop pretend play at around 15 months of age. What are children doing when they pretend play? And why are they so absorbed in works of imagination? When I was seven years old, I devoured book after book and pleaded with my parents for those not already in the bookcase. By playing out scenarios and extending themselves beyond their limited experience, children seek to make sense of the world and find their place within it. This meaning-making is full of emotion—joy, excitement, awe—and finds an echo in every subsequent act of creation.
Whenever we look at an object such as the Mona Lisa, we see much more than just the frame and the brushstrokes. In fact, we barely see the brushstrokes at all. In imagination as in our dreams, we ascribe form, pattern, and significance to things, and then reflect them back onto those things. Without this work of interpretation and assimilation, the world would be no more than an endless stream of sense impressions—as it may sometimes seem to those who lack imagination—with no hope of escape or reprieve.
Imagination in Everyday Life
More than that, by imagination we are able to complete the world, or our world, by conjuring up the missing parts, and even to inhabit entirely other worlds such as Middle-earth or the Seven Kingdoms. Imagination remains highly active throughout adulthood. What are novels, films, computer games, and even pornography if not aids to the adult imagination?
If imagination lets us feel at home in the world, it also enables us to get things done in the world. Science advances by hypothesis, which is a function of imagination, and philosophy makes frequent use of thought experiments such as the brain in the vat, the trolley problem, and Plato’s Republic. More than that, imagination enables us to form associations and connections, and thereby to apply our knowledge to real-life situations. It opens up alternatives and possibilities, and guides our decision-making by playing them out in our mind. So many of our failures—and, dare I say, a few of our more boring successes—are in fact failures of the imagination.
Imagination and Other Minds
Imagination also enables us to talk to one another, understand one another, and work together. Without it, there could be no metaphor, no irony, no humour, no past or future tenses, and no conditional either. Indeed, there could be no language at all, for what are words if not symbols and representations? Every conversation depends upon imagination—for every listener must recreate in the theatre of the mind what the speaker can only suggest.By imagination, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes, think what they think, feel what they feel, and project them and our relationship into the future. Difficulties with imagination are thought to contribute to some of the characteristic features of autism, including impairments in social interaction and communication together with restricted interests and patterns of behaviour.
Cultivating the Imagination
Imagination is the highest form of thought, and almost divine in its reach. With enough imagination, we could identify and solve all our problems. With enough imagination, we would never have to work again—or, at least, not for money. With enough imagination, we could win over, or defeat, anyone we wanted to. But our imagination is so poor that we haven’t even imagined what it would be like to have that kind of imagination.
I’m lucky to have received a decent education, but one thing it certainly didn’t do for me is cultivate my imagination. In fact, medical school in particular did everything to destroy it. In recent years, I’ve been trying to recover the bright and vivid imagination that I left behind in primary school. For that, I’ve been doing just three things, all of them very simple—or, at least, very simple to explain.
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The ancient Greek sophist Gorgias compared the power of words to the power of drugs. More than two thousand years later, his insight is as compelling as ever. Words can persuade and deceive, comfort and inspire, alter the course of a life—or even the march of history.
Gorgias (483—375 BCE) hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied the art of persuasion—or rhetoric—under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse and was also acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.
If Athens gave birth to philosophy, Sicily gave birth to rhetoric. Gorgias inherited the techniques of Corax and Tisias, the nominal founders of rhetoric, but transformed them into something that could dazzle audiences.
Indeed, Gorgias was something of a showman. He delighted in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised all those who heard him. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, “Come, propose me a theme!” He took great pride in his ability to defend any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore (‘off the cuff’) oratory.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises Gorgias’ style of oratory as ‘ironic’—and Gorgias’ opinions, if he had any at all, are hard to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.
In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates: “I have often heard Gorgias maintain, Socrates, that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.”
Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helenand the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being.
Words as Magic
In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias sets himself the unlikely task of praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.
In defending Helen, Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: ‘Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.’
A doctor’s diagnosis, a judge’s verdict, a declaration of love, a political speech, a prayer, or a promise may consist of nothing more than words, yet each can change the course of a life—even the course of nations and the march of history.
Perhaps this is why so many ancient cultures regarded words as sacred. In the Vedas, speech is revered as a divine power, and even personified as the goddess Vac. A similar idea can be found in the Bible, at John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In Genesis, God does not create the world with his hands, but by speech: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’
As a psychiatrist, I am often reminded of Gorgias’ insight. Faced with a suicidal patient, everything may depend upon finding the right words at the right moment. A single sentence, if it is the right one, can alter a person’s entire outlook. Equally, a single sentence can break—or make—a career or a relationship.
The linguist may insist that ‘casting spells’ and ‘spelling words’ have different etymologies; the psychologist suspects that they spring from the same ancient intuition. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.
Nothing Exists
In On Non-Being, Gorgias pushes his fascination with language to its absolute limit. Responding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who held that reality is one and accessible to reason, he parodies his arguments by turning each of them on its head: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it; (3) even if something could be known, this knowledge could not be communicated to others; and (4) even if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his genuine opinions.
Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. He taught Aristippus’ one-time beloved, the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the Ten Attic Orators.
In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:
…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…
Having no wife or children, Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.
Plato’s attacks ensured that the Sophists would long be remembered as clever tricksters rather than serious thinkers. Yet Gorgias deserves a more generous hearing. More than two thousand years ago, he recognised something we are still apt to forget: words do not merely describe the world. They shape how we experience it.
Every day we persuade, comfort, deceive, negotiate, inspire, forgive, and fall in love with nothing more substantial than sounds carried through the air. That is the nearest thing to magic that human beings have ever possessed.
Does Language Merely Express Our Thoughts—or Does It Help to Create Them?
Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 22 August 2026.
Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows. Punting in Oxford on a late summer evening. Can you hear it?
Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other means. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with conceptual thought, problem solving, and creativity. These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits, such as philosophy, art, and science, that define us as human beings.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without language itself. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty of sight or the faculty of language? This is probably the first time that you have faced this question: The faculty of language is so fundamental to what it means to be human that, unlike the faculty of sight, we take it completely for granted. ‘Monkeys’ quipped Kenneth Grahame, ‘very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’ Monks, too, are the same.
If rhetoric, the beauty of language, can so bend us, how about language itself? In other words, how does the language you speak influence the way you think? The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, that’s for sure, but does it also determine thought, as claimed by Sapir and Whorf?
Does Language Determine Thought?
Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over seven thousand languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out every two weeks or so. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive and think about more than just two colours.
More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht, which denotes dissatisfaction with reality and yearning for a richer, ‘realer’ ideal. But despite lacking the word, the American poet Walt Whitman (d. 1892) was able, quite successfully, to conjure both the concept and the emotion: Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.
The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (‘orphan’), and a word for people who have lost their spouse (‘widow’ or ‘widower’), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover’s face or other part of their anatomy. Animals and pre-linguistic babies surely have thoughts, even though they have no language.
How Does Language Interact with Thought?
If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades and the other for darker shades—goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy, but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy. Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived in the UK for a long time see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, by carving up the world, language supports and enhances cognition.
In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak of ‘the wine-dark sea’. But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for ‘love’, including philia, eros, storge, and agape, each one referring to a different type or concept of love, respectively, friendship, sexual love, familial love, and universal or charitable love. This means that the Ancient Greeks could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, lead more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps they had more words for love because they led more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.
Philosophers and academics sometimes make up words to help them talk and think about an issue. In the Phaedrus, Plato coined the word psychagogia, the art of leading souls, while discussing rhetoric—which, it turns out, is another word that he invented. Every field of human endeavour invariably evolves its own specialised jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.
While we’re talking dead languages, it may come as a surprise that Latin has no direct translations for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Instead, one either echoes the verb in the question (in affirmative or negative) or expresses one’s feelings about the truth value of the proposition with adverbs such as certe, fortasse, nimirum, plane, vero, etiam, sane, minime… This may have led to more nuanced thinking, as well as greater interpersonal engagement, though it must have been a nightmare for teens—if they even had teens in those days.
More than a century before Sapir and Whorf, Humboldt (Wilhelm, not Alexander) arrived at a similar insight: every language embodies a particular Weltansicht, or view of the world. Language is not simply a system of labels for an already divided reality, but a way of dividing and organising reality.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897).
Built-in Bias and Prejudice
As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. English, for instance, restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has read’) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that—or, at least, subconsciously.
Language is full of built-in assumptions and prejudices of this kind. Here’s another, more substantial example. When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasise the agent (‘I fired the gun’) more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent (‘the gun went off’). One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events—and, I surmise, to attach blame.
Some languages seem more egocentric than others. Many languages forgo the explicit use of the personal pronoun, which is instead built into the verb. For example, ‘I want’ in Spanish is simply quiero. English in contrast requires the explicit use of the personal pronoun in all cases, as does French. Unlike Spanish and Italian, French has lost many of the spoken distinctions between its verb endings, making the personal pronoun necessary: je parle, tu parles, il parle… all sound essentially the same. What’s more, French speakers often double up on the first-person personal pronoun, as in Moi, je pense que… [Me, I think that] with the stress on the moi. Sometimes, they also redouble on other personal pronouns, Et toi, qu’en penses-tu? [And you, what do you think about it?]. But redoubling on the first-person personal pronoun is much more common: Bon allez, moi j’en ai marre [Whatever, I’m fed up me]. Because je is obligatory, French calls for the additional moi to place special emphasis on the speaker. This redoubling, this pleonasm, is more a feature of the spoken than the written word, and, depending on the context, can serve to emphasise or simply acknowledge a difference of opinion. Equivalent forms in English are more strained and recondite, and less commonly used, for example, ‘Well, as for me, I think that…’ The redoubling, in French, on the first-person personal pronoun seems to inject drama into a conversation, as though the speaker were acting out her own part, or playing up her difference and separateness.
In English, verbs express tense, that is, the time relative to the moment of speaking. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality), that is, whether the information has been acquired directly through sense perception, or only indirectly by testimony or inference. In Russian, verbs include information about completion, with (to simplify a bit) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasises modes of being, with two verbs for ‘to be’—ser, to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar, to indicate temporary states and locations. Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. There used to be a similar distinction in English, with ‘thou’ used to express intimacy, familiarity, or downright rudeness—but because it is archaic, many people now think of it as more formal than ‘you’: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate… It stands to reason that, compared to English speakers, Turkish speakers have to pay more attention to evidentiality, Russian speakers to completion, and Spanish speakers to modes of being and social relations. In the words of Jakobson, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’ Language may not prevent us from thinking certain thoughts, but it may make those thoughts more unlikely, and compel us, every time we speak, to notice certain features of the world.
In many languages, nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. In German, there is a third, neutral class of nouns. In Dyribal, an Aboriginal language, there are four noun classes, including one for women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals—or, as Lakoff put it, ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. Researchers asked German speakers and Spanish speakers to describe objects with opposite gender assignments in German and Spanish and found that their descriptions conformed to gender stereotypes, even when the testing took place in English. For example, teutophones tended to describe bridges (feminine in German, die Brücke) as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, whereas hispanophones tended to describe bridges (masculine in Spanish, el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.
Another study looking at the personification in art of abstract concepts such as love, justice, and time found that, in 78% of cases, the gender of the concept in the artist’s language predicted the gender of the personification, and that this pattern held even for uncommon allegories such as geometry, necessity, and silence. Compared to a French or Spanish artist, a German artist is far more likely to paint death [der Tod, la mort, la muerte] or victory [der Sieg, la victoire, la victoria] as a man—though all artists, or at least all Western artists, tend to paint death in skeletal form. So grammar, it seems, can directly and radically influence thought, perception, and action.
It is often said that, by de-emphasising them, language perpetuates biases against women. For example, many writers in English continue to use ‘mankind’ to talk about humankind, and ‘he’ for ‘he or she’. Similarly, many languages use masculine plural pronouns to refer to groups of people with at least one man. If a hundred women turn up with a baby in a pram, and that baby happens to have a penis, French grammar dictates the use of the masculine plural ils: ils sont arrivés, ‘they have arrived’.
Language changes as attitudes change, and sometimes politicians, pressure groups, and others attempt to change the language to change the attitudes—but, on the whole, language, or at least grammar, serves to preserve the status quo, to crystallise and perpetuate the order and culture that gave rise to it. It’s quite a thought: many of the words in our mouths are thousands of years old, or built from shorter words that are. They are by far the oldest thing about us.
Language is also made up of all sorts of metaphors. In English and Swedish, people tend to speak of time in terms of distance: ‘I won’t be long’; ‘let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’; ‘his drinking finally caught up with him’. But in Spanish or Greek, people tend to speak of time in terms of size or volume—for example, in Spanish, hacemos una pequeña pausa [let’s have a small break] rather than corta pausa [short break]. More generally, mucho tiempo [much time] is preferred to largo tiempo [long time], and, in Greek, poli ora to makry kroniko diastima. And guess what… According to a study of bilingual Spanish-Swedish speakers, the language used to estimate the duration of events alters the speaker’s perception of the relative passage of time.
But all in all, with a few exceptions, European languages, or even Indo-European languages, do not differ dramatically from one another. In contrast, to talk about space, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal language, use sixteen words for absolute cardinal directions instead of relative references such as ‘right in front of you’, ‘to the right’, and ‘over there’. As a result, even their children are always aware of the exact direction in which they are facing. When asked to arrange a sequence of picture cards in temporal order, English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, whereas Hebrew or Arabic speakers tend to arrange them from right to left. But speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre consistently arrange them from east to west, which is left to right if they are facing south, and right to left if they are facing north. Thinking differently about space, they seem to think differently about time as well.
Language may not determine thought, but it focuses perception and attention on particular aspects of reality, structures and thereby enhances cognitive processes, and even to some extent regulates social relationships. Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. There is no equivalent in English of the Portuguese word saudade, which refers to the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong and so bitter as to have written itself into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal [Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal]. The three strands of language, thought, and culture are so tightly woven that they cannot be prised apart.
It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that crumbles into the sea.
Winawer J et al (2007): Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104(19):7780-5.
Fausey CM et al. (2010): Constructing Agency: The Role of Language. Front Psychol 1:162.
Boroditsky L et al. (2003): Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition, ed. Genter D & Goldin-Meadow S, pp. 61-80. Cambridge University Press.
Segel E & Boroditsky L (2010): Grammar in Art. Front Psychol. 1:244.
Bylund E & Athanasopoulos P (2017): The Whorfian Time Warp: Representing Duration Through the Language Hourglass. J Exp Psychol Gen. 146(7):911-916.
Gaby A (2012): The Thaayorre Think of Time Like They Talk of Space. Front Psychol 3:300.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 23 August 2026.
It can come as a surprise to many people in the UK and US that speaking more than one language is the norm rather than the exception. In prehistoric times, most people belonged to small linguistic communities, and had to speak several languages to trade with, and marry into, neighbouring communities.
Still today, remaining populations of hunter-gatherers are almost all multilingual. Papua New Guinea, a country smaller than Spain, counts some 850 languages, or about one language per 10,000 inhabitants. In countries such as India, Malaysia, and South Africa, most people are bilingual or better. Even in the world at large, polyglots outnumber monoglots. And with the advent of the internet, contact with foreign languages has become increasingly frequent, even for the most linguistically isolated of monoglots.
In sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth I could speak at least nine languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish. A few days after her death in 1603, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli wrote back to his Doge and Senate:
She possessed nine languages so thoroughly that each appeared to be her native tongue; five of these were the languages of peoples governed by her, English, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, for that part of her possessions where they are still savage [lo scozzese per quella parte de’ suoi possessi dove sono ancora selvaggi], and Irish. All of them are so different, that it is impossible for those who speak the one to understand any of the others. Besides this, she spoke perfectly Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian extremely well.
No wonder the ‘Virgin Queen’ didn’t want to get married.
Cognitive and Economic Benefits
To speak a language competently implies knowledge of the culture associated with the language. Multilingualism is closely linked to multiculturalism, and, historically, both came under attack with the rise of the nation state. In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the British Prime Minister Theresa May stated: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’—as though that were somehow deviant or problematic. Human beings, and their tongues, are far older than any nation state.
Still today, some people believe that teaching a child more than one language can impair the child’s linguistic and cognitive development. But what’s the evidence? According to several studies, people who learn another language do significantly better on standardised tests. Language management calls upon executive functions such as attention control, cognitive inhibition, and working memory, and it appears that bi- and multilingual people are better at observing, multitasking, and problem solving. They also have a larger working memory, including for tasks that do not involve language.
Being multilingual can also improve judgement. According to one study, people who think through a moral dilemma in a foreign language come to much more rational, or utilitarian, conclusions—perhaps because certain words lose some of their emotional weight, or because the problem is seen from a different cultural perspective or processed through different neural channels. So, if you have a second language, you can use it, like a good friend, to check yourself.
The cognitive benefits of bilingualism, disputed though they are, also extend to health. A study of hospital records in Toronto, Canada, found that bilingual people were diagnosed with dementia on average three to four years later than their monolingual counterparts from a similar educational and occupational background. Another study in Northern Italy looking at people at the same stage of Alzheimer’s disease found that the bilingual people were on average five years older, and had stronger connections between the brain areas involved in executive function. Over in India, a study of 600 stroke survivors found that the bilingual ones had a much better outcome. Specifically, 40.5% of the bilingual patients had normal cognition compared to just 19.6% of the monolingual ones. Of course, multilingualism is entangled with education, occupation, and other confounding factors, but the direction of the effect is difficult to doubt.
And then there are the undisputed economic benefits. High-level bilingualism has been linked to higher income, even after controlling for confounding factors such as educational attainment and parental socio-economic status. Over the course of a forty-year career, this additional income might add up to a pension fund. Of course, the overall economic impact of multilingualism is much greater than the sum of the higher earnings of multilingual speakers. Switzerland’s multilingual heritage has been estimated to contribute as much as 10% of GDP, whereas lack of language skills in the UK could be costing the British economy around 3.5% of GDP in lost output.
Personal, Social, and Cultural Benefits
Being bilingual may have important cognitive and economic benefits, but it is usually the personal, social, and cultural benefits that multilingual people are keenest to emphasise.
Many bilingual people feel that the way they are, and the way they see the world—and even the way they laugh and love—changes according to the language that they are speaking. In the 1960s, Susan Ervin-Tripp asked Japanese-English bilingual women to finish sentences in each language, and found that the women came up with very different endings depending on whether they were speaking English or Japanese. For example, they completed ‘Real friends should…’ with ‘…help each other’ in Japanese, but ‘…be frank’ in English. ‘Who’s your favourite writer?’ ‘What do you want to eat for dinner?’ ‘Shall we break all the rules?’ Ask a question in one language, and you get one answer; ask the same question in another language, and you might get a different one. ‘To have another language,’ said Charlemagne, ‘is to have another soul.’
Translation dictionaries seem to assume that languages are made up of corresponding words, but even when that is more or less the case, the equivalencies have different connotations. Compared to ‘I like you’ in English, je t’aime in French is a far more serious proposition. George Carlin once joked that ‘meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat—but, of course, it doesn’t. Owing to a certain je ne sais quoi, some things are more readily expressed in one language than in another. By code-switching, multilingual speakers can increase their range of expression and perhaps even their range of thought. In the words of Wittgenstein: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’
Certain languages are better suited to certain purposes, for example, English is great for science and technology, French is better for cooking and complaining, and Latin is best for praying and formal rites of passage. Multilingual people are free to pick and choose, maybe along the lines of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: ‘I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.’ Charles V did not get on with the German lords and preferred to live in Spain, sitting on the newly created Spanish throne by right of his incarcerated mother, Joanna the Mad (Juana la Loca)—things I know because I speak Spanish. And after a few glasses of fino, I’m almost fluent.
The more languages we learn, the easier it becomes to learn languages. But learning a language also strengthens our first language. For instance, one study found that Spanish immersion significantly improved children’s native English vocabulary. More broadly, learning a language casts light upon our first language and language in general, increasing our appreciation of language and ability to communicate. ‘You speak English beautifully,’ wrote Robert Aickman in The Wine-Dark Sea (1966), ‘which means you can’t be English.’
Just before writing this article, I asked my social media followers the following question: ‘If you are bi- or multilingual, what do you most value about that fact?’
And here are some of their responses:
The freedom to access different cultures plus the possibility to read many authors in original version!
Being fluent in a couple of other languages has given me insight into other ways of seeing the world. That helps empathy, and openness.
I appreciate the cognitive advantages being multilingual has offered. Also the connections with culture, history, and the knowledge acquired.
Language is knowledge. Always useful to be a little less ignorant.
It feels as if I can switch into two different modes and think from different perspectives.
I’m more outgoing in one language than another. It’s not just that I speak differently—I feel like a slightly different person.
My voice, gestures, and even sense of humour change when I switch languages.
Difficult or intimate things can be easier to say in my second language. There’s a little more distance between the words and me.
Being more tolerant—new language = new culture, new and different perspectives/access to more information.
That I can talk wine with twice as many ppl.
It gives me patience and understanding for those who want to articulate, but have difficulty conveying what they really mean.
The fact that I can fully understand and communicate in another language (Afrikaans) makes me feel good.
It gave me an understanding that ‘thoughts’ don’t come into my head in a language at all. Thoughts come as ‘ideas’. Only when I have to verbalise my ideas, I have to use a language.
I’m bilingual in India. There’s nothing special about it here. Know a ton of people who are trilingual. In India, multilingualism starts becoming impressive if the language count’s above like five or something.
Obviously, being able to speak about people in elevators without them knowing what’s said. 😉
Having a variety of options when cussing.
Every language on this earth has its own rules and conventions, its own sounds and rhythms, its own beauty and poetry, its own history and philosophy. Every language on this earth is another way of being human, another way of being alive.
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