Other linguists and anthropologists take a different approach to the relation between language and thought. They believe that different languages produce different ways of thinking. This position sometimes is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after Edward Sapir (1931) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), its prominent early advocates.
Sapir and Whorf argued that the grammatical categories of particular languages lead their speakers to think about things in different ways. For example, English divides time into past, present, and future. Hopi, a language of the Pueblo region of the Native American Southwest, does not. Rather, Hopi distinguishes between events that exist or have existed (what we use present and past to discuss) and those that don’t or don’t yet (our future events, along with imaginary and hypothetical events). Whorf argued that this difference leads Hopi speakers to think about time and reality in different ways than English speakers do.
A similar example comes from Portuguese, which employs a future subjunctive verb form, introducing a degree of uncertainty into discussions of the future. In English we routinely use the future tense to talk about something we think will happen. We don’t feel the need to qualify “The sun’ll come out tomorrow,” by adding “if it doesn’t go supernova.” We don’t hesitate to proclaim “I’ll see you next year,” even when we can’t be absolutely sure we will. The Portuguese future subjunctive qualifies the future event, recognizing that the future can’t be certain. Our way of expressing the future as certain is so ingrained that we don’t even think about it, just as the Hopi don’t see the need to distinguish between present and past, both of which are real, while the future remains hypothetical.
It seems, however, that language does not tightly restrict thought, because cultural changes can produce changes in thought and in language.