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Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought

Long Now

CHAPTER

The Importance of Language in Constructing Reality

Each language provides us with its own cognitive toolkit. It encapsulates the knowledge and worldview that's been developed over thousands of years in a culture. Indonesians who've learned English start putting more temporal information in their Indonesian. So, they're actually changing the way they speak their native language based on this other language that they've learned. If we understand how language and thought interact in the mind, we can even be nationalistic in a more effective manner.

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