Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will affect their thought process and therefore people will have different thought processes based on their mother tongues.
Linguistic determinism is the strong form of linguistic relativism (popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), which argues that individuals experience the world based on the structure of the language they habitually use. Since the 20th century, linguistic determinism has largely been discredited by studies and abandoned within linguistics, cognitive science, and related fields.
