Glossary of Items

Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought. Determinism itself refers to the viewpoint that all events are caused by previous events, and linguistic determinism can be used broadly to refer to a number of specific views.

The linguistic relativity principle is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it. Popularly, the distinction is between a weak and a strong version (i) weak: „language limits thought‟ and (ii) strong: „language determines thought‟.