It’s actually a pretty hard task to write an article, with words, about words. This I have discovered investigating the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a popular idea at the start of the 19th century that discusses how our native language affects the way we think. In it, I am born into a pattern of existence laid out by the language I use. It has largely been sidelined in the scientific study of language, but is perhaps not as irrelevant as it first seems. Typically, these days, we think of language as a means of self-expression – but what if the converse were true? What does my language have to do with my identity? And why does it matter?

My own language, English, is a language of saying one thing and meaning something else: a language of politeness that sometimes lacks compassion, a language that Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen share in. It is one of hesitation and meaningless fillers, one of beautiful and precise olfactory sounds, one of passive constructions and purposelessness. It is a language that uses convolution to mask irony, which masks self-ridicule, which in turn masks a deep-reaching self-doubt. It doesn’t deal often in unrealisable subjunctives and layers of conditionality. Instead, it is a language lived in the present continuous, not one that finishes, but one that is always in the process of finishing.

Do these lines explain who I am? Is this why I say ‘sorry’ all the time even when I’m not, why I am constantly told not to over-complicate my sentences when I write in other languages? Or do I use English to express an identity that I already have in common with other British people?

“Perhaps I wear a language like the clothes I choose every morning to go to lectures in”

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis doesn’t always make sense to me, however. I study MML, and the idea of language is always floating about in my mind. I divide my personality – or, I am divided – between three different languages each day. When I read in translation, I know that I’m missing out on something, yet in French and in German, I feel separated from myself. Often, a thought will be trying to break out of me, but I can’t vocalise it, because I lack the words. In my communications in a language not my own, my thoughts are stretched like a fine spider’s web, full of the holes of things I can only express in English.

In different languages, our thoughts are pinned to the corkboard of life in different ways. Are we, then, confined to an Orwellian restriction, à la 1984, of what it is possible to think by the very fact of belonging to a nation and employing its language – “But if thoughts can corrupt language, language can also corrupt thought?” If so, every language becomes Newspeak by its very definition. No matter how many words a language contains, or how many of them we know, there will never be enough to express all identity.

Only maybe I have more ‘say’ than I think. Nascent thoughts, uncapturable by language, exist. I can conceive of an idea and not know how to express it in words. Hence, we seek to define these thoughts, and ourselves, as a nation via the shared language that we employ. We infuse it with culture and make it belong to us, so that we can wave it as a banner of our distinctiveness. So, is language not something that we wield control over?

Are you too moral to learn a language?

Perhaps I wear a language like the clothes I choose every morning to go to lectures in. I fit inside these clothes, but I still choose whether to wear the red jumper or the blue. In the same way, I grow into a language that has been set out for me, but the choice of how to employ it is mine. To use my languages gives me immense pleasure. I know that I will never have complete control over them, but in this realisation, I’m halfway there.

 The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may appear outdated, but it still resonates in the current moment. In an inevitable paradox, language both opens and closes doors for us. It prescribes identity: it expresses the essence of us even before we begin to use it.

However, it is also a way for us to affirm our identity. We may sometimes feel like Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith. But, just as he writes illicitly in his diary, we speak and we write. Language is a self-reflective tool, and we have to use it. Ultimately, it is the only means that we have to analyse ourselves