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This essay looks at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience. This essay looks at how emotional differences in language are tied to the grammar and mechanics and they can't be shared borrowed across languages

How different aspects of speech, such as intonation and dynamics, affect how we perceive other people's personalities

"Consistent with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, participants were quicker at distinguishing between a 'green' and a 'blue' than between two 'greens' or two 'blues', but crucially, this advantage only pertained when the colours appeared on the right-hand side of space [when the brain is using the "language-dominant left hemisphere"]."

In 2010, two articulate powerhouse linguists, Lena Boroditsky, of Stanford, and Mark Liberman, of U. Penn., squared off on the above topic. Boroditsky advanced the Neo-Whorfian position that language does indeed shape thought. Liberman countered, noting that thought also shapes our language we speak, and the way we live shapes both language and thought. When we encounter or create new ideas, we can usually describe them with new combinations of old words. And if not, we easily adapt or borrow or create the new words or phrases we need. As Edward Sapir once put it, "We may say that a language is so constructed that no matter what any speaker of it may desire to communicate … the language is prepared to do his work."

Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about. When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.