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Welcome, Mid-September 2026!
After enduring some three weeks of rainy weather in much of our province, many Saskatchewanians feel we’ve been annexed not by the US (as, say, Trump has threatened) but by rainy West Coast BC, or East Coast Maritimes!
But with cooler temperatures accompanying recent rain (highs hovering around only 15 degrees Celsius), summer 2026 now is “well and truly over.” The shortening of daylight hours is already appreciable. But has the start of a new program and/or academic year brought any spring to your steps, even amid these challenging economic and political times? How are you finding hope in this new season, good readers?
In place of “Article One,” this month, I feature a “special report” based on the work of cognitive scientist and linguist, Lera Boroditsky, that all learners and teachers of languages (including English) would do well to read: “Does the language we speak shape the way we think?” she asks. Her response illumines some of the complex underpinnings of both linguicide and of linguistic preservation. So language lovers and specialists, please take note!
And in “Shop News,” I acknowledge some of the wonderful work of mentors, peers and clients in my network, despite the political and economic worries we all face, today.
As we progress toward the final quarter of this year, local woman leader and writer, Linda McCann, has blogged on the importance of noticing “the promise of September.” Despite the content of the nightly news, this month warrants our awareness:
“[September] is a time to reflect on the desires of our hearts and the longings of our souls, as we consider the months ahead . . . . September has always held a special promise, even in the most challenging times. It brings the anticipation of a harvest, the start of a new school year, reconnections with friends and fresh opportunities for learning. It’s also a time to walk in nature, savouring the changing colours, scents and sounds of this abundant season.”
Wherever you are in our beloved country or beyond, whether on business or personal ventures; or if you’ve returned home after some summer days away, I wish each of you such an awareness of September’s “promise.”
Despite the “affordability crisis” and worries that many of us feel, we can still find “abundance” and solid ground in the rights, freedoms and integrity that characterize Canada’s (and Saskatchewan’s) sovereignty. These rights are worth remembering and asserting, as we continue to co-exist with authoritarian political nations around the globe.
Having some small pleasures may help: whether you can savour a bowl of homemade soup at “D’lish by Tish”; whether you can open a library copy of the latest novel by a favourite author (Louise Penny, Alexander McCall-Smith or another); or whether you wait, excitedly, like me, for the next film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel (of endurance despite poverty and neglect), Sense and Sensibility; please know that you are not alone! . . . And as you enjoy the crunch of gold and crimson leaves when you walk the Meewasin Trail (that is now expanding), may you live this new season with renewed perseverance, good readers.
As Linda McCann reminds us, yes, there will be both “challenges and gifts” in this new year. But there will also be new friendships forged, old ones renewed, and at least some of our cherished hopes fulfilled.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Shih
Principal
Storytelling Communications
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IN THIS ISSUE:
SPECIAL REPORT:
Does language shape the way we think? An answer from linguist and cognitive psychologist, Dr. Lera Boroditsky
SHOP NEWS
ABOUT US
SHOP NEWS:
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Article One: Special Report: “ ‘Does the language we speak shape the way we think?’ ” On linguicide and linguistic preservation with (Dr.) Lera Boroditsky
Linguist and cognitive psychologist, Dr. Lera Boroditsky, delivered a TED Talk (November 2017):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k .
And I recommend her recent interview (from July 7, 2026):
https://iai.tv/video/language-shapes-thought-not-the-other-way-around-with-lera-boroditsky
In these times of surging authoritarian politics and resulting economic turmoil, academic studies, including the study of languages, are regularly subordinated to political aggression and violence. Putatively “democratic” leaders have slashed funding and programming for many forms of education, holding in contempt fields like minority language. When fewer politicians value the study of English (and despite its status as the international language for business), what hope does the world hold for preserving lesser-known, minority languages and cultures?
In these hostile times, cognitive scientist and linguist Lera Boroditsky persists in conducting research that resists the blinkered philosophy of authoritarianism. Her research has transformed our understanding of how languages work. She pushes back on today’s political regimes, asserting unequivocally the importance of language for human existence: “ ‘Languages shape the way we think.’”
Many of us still believe that knowledge and thinking still matter,
and Canada is pleased to welcome academics and intellectuals from the United States, who have lost their funding and resources for research and experiments.
In her TEDTalk from November 2017, Lera Boroditsky starts in simple terms to explain how language works: “The tones and hisses and puffs that we make when we speak create vibrations in the air, . . . . travel to ear drums of listeners; [the] brain takes and transforms those sounds into thoughts.” Language and linguistic communication are born.
By this miraculous process, she observes, “humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast ranges of space and time. We can transmit knowledge across minds.”
She cites that there are “about 7,000 languages spoken in the world” (2017) and “all of these languages differ from each other in many ways.”
We used to think of language as a neutral tool of communication, she adds, and that speakers of every language had to think alike.
But Boroditsky believes in linguistic relativity, the concept that the language you speak influences how you think, perceive and view the world. From that viewpoint, she reveals that language does not determine and limit how we think or perceive the world–instead it shapes, guides or influences our perceptions of space, time, colour, causality and experience (Boroditsky 2026).
Different languages have different “sounds, vocabularies and structures”—this begs the question: “Does the language we speak shape the way we think?” Or do we think before expressing those thoughts in language? People have speculated responses to this question for thousands of years, without any clear outcome (she cites examples from Charlemagne and Shakespeare). But Boroditsky’s research has shown that language shapes the fundamentals of thought, so how we organize space, time, how we process colour, how we think about events – even at these basic building blocks of cognition, “language can have a really profound effect on how we put together the world in our minds.”
This viewpoint of “linguistic relativity” was earlier dismissed within and outside the field of linguistics, itself.
Twentieth-century linguistic study, such as that led by philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky and his followers, posited that “languages didn’t substantially differ from one another at the core.” The idea of a core was hypothetical, never established, but claimed. The claim was “languages don’t fundamentally differ.” Boroditsky adds: “If you believe that, then it makes no sense to ask if speakers of different languages would think differently.”
But field work by linguists and the influence of cognitive psychology have since found that languages do differ, “so the next question became how do those differences in language reflect in speakers’ thinking?”
In the most recent of her various interviews on language (for the “Institute of Art and Ideas’ (IAI) Television,” July 7, 2026), Boroditsky says that skepticism raises the question of whether cognition (human thought) is malleable: “If thinking can’t be changed, then it wouldn’t matter that languages differ. Everyone thinks the same way. But then decades of research in cognitive psychology showed that cognition is malleable and flexible” (my emphasis).
She continues: once we hold these “two puzzle pieces—that languages really differ from each other; and cognition is really malleable—with those two insights, you create an environment where you can see the incredibly profound differences between speakers of different languages.
Boroditsky says an Aboriginal community in Australia (“Kuuk Thaayorre”) shows that language does shape how we think because instead of using “left” and “right,” it uses cardinal directions (NE, SW) for spatial orientation– (i) space.
The perception of (ii) time differs greatly between languages, with (for example) the past receiving greater or lesser significance in certain cultures.
Languages also differ in whether they (iii) count by number or not. Monolinguistic English speakers may be surprised to learn that not all languages do use numbers to count!
Languages vary by distinguishing or (iv) perceiving colour differently. Boroditsky says the Russian language (her L1) has several words to discriminate the colour “blue.” Not surprisingly, then, Russians are faster at discriminating colour than speakers of other languages are.
She argues that languages have a lot of different structural quirks. For instance, many languages have (v) gendered nouns (often masculine or feminine) that differ from other languages (e.g. The “sun” is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish. By contrast, the “moon” is masculine in German but feminine in Spanish.) These gendered designations (vi) can affect how speakers describe concepts (so Germans will describe a “bridge,” in stereotypical feminine terms, as “elegant,” “beautiful,” etc., while Spanish will describe the term “bridge” in stereotypically masculine terms as “strong,” or “large,” etc.)
Human speakers of different languages will pay attention to different things, Boroditsky says, depending on what their particular knowledge requires them to do. This affects (vii) causality.
For instance, in her TEDtalk, she says, if you show a video or photo of an accident (in which a large man is about to accidentally knock over a vase in a museum), English speakers will ask: “Who broke the vase?”
By contrast, Spanish speakers, she says, are less likely to remember who caused the accident, but will focus instead on that it was an accident that occurred. So two different eye-witnesses speaking different languages will remember different things about the identical accident they have witnessed.
Because language guides how we reason about the events we witness, Boroditsky says English-speaking witnesses will blame the person who broke the vase, while Spanish speakers will simply observe that the vase broke. As she observes, these perceptual differences carry many potential implications, such as for eye-witness testimonies and judicial systems.
These above seven differences matter. In her IAI interview, Boroditsky says her experiments have found “how deeply language moulds our perception and knowledge of the world, so that losing languages is in fact dangerous” (my emphasis).
She says, later, in the same interview: “Language can shape blame, punishment, judgment, memory.”
She asserts there is no “correct” language or way of speaking—all languages are highly subjective; we want to have both flexibility and precision in vocabulary, so we need not commit to specificity that we don’t observe to exist. But Boroditsky says that the many differences in language make us realize we need languages to continue to “grow and not to reduce in number.”
But when asked if languages can “trap” their users (consider Fredric Jameson’s concept of “the prisonhouse of language”), she also observes the limits of language: “People believe the structures of their languages way too much,” thinking that their language reflects all of reality, when “each language is just a human-made artifact, that was constructed over thousands of years under circumstances that may no longer apply to our lives anymore.” This is no reason to abandon the language, however, but rather to study it critically.
She adds that “when we learn second or third language, we start to see how different languages treat the world differently and so [we] believe the structures of our languages less and question things more.”
While all humans “have the capacity to see things in lots of different ways, if you speak only one language, you’re hardly ever invited to consider what the structures of your language are guiding you to think—[and] that you could think about differently.”
So what is the impact of a loss of linguistic diversity? This need not be phrased as hypothetical as it is changing by the week. Boroditsky says: “A loss of a language is a loss of an incredible amount of human intellectual labour. It’s all of the people who have come before, or in that culture, who worked together to construct a representation of reality, to construct a cosmology, to construct all of these ideas, and when the last fluent speakers of a language pass away, all of that intellectual labour is gone” (my emphasis).
She cites the late American linguist Ken Hale for likening the loss of a single language to a bomb dropping on the Louvre; but Boroditsky says linguicide (whether by deliberate or indirect death) and erasure of a language (often driven by political, legal or colonial policies) is “a lot worse [than bombing], because with a lot of the languages that we’re losing, they’re not well-documented, so we don’t have a way to reconstruct that information . . . . And then the loss that the descendents of those people feel is extremely strong because they lose that connection to their past, to their ancestors, to the ways of life that brought them up. So it’s an incredible loss when we lose languages.”
Languages are “always blending, growing, changing, to suit our needs, inventing new ways of talking”—these things “that have been happening as long as there have been languages, so there are not tradeoffs between these things; it’s a natural process.” There is no such thing as linguistic purity. We should not fear the regular transmutations that occur within languages, between different speakers, groups or cultures.
Boroditsky found, when she moved from the former Soviet Union to the US at age 12 that “people’s perspectives” at school “could be different about the very basics of life.” She remembers that due to these differing perspectives, she had a lot of discussions and arguments with Americans she met, but the “crux of the disagreement” was that “they were using the same words to mean very different things” (e.g. words like “freedom” and “justice”).
Seeing that one word could refer to many things “cemented [Boroditsky’s] desire to understand how language and thought relate to one another, because so many of our important discussions in society are done in language, hinge on language and sometimes are confused by language.”
So what do we need to do, to see languages grow, not least in contemporary times, when we have returned politically to authoritarianism? Boroditsky says we must “accept linguistic diversity is the normal human condition, that the human mind has created not one way of perceiving reality but thousands of them, is a real testament to the ingenuity and flexibility of the human mind. So if we start from the baseline assumption of diversity as a norm, that gives us a very different lens on what it means to be human and allows us to explore the human mind in all of its richness” (my emphasis).
So “rather than starting in linguistic study [as Chomsky and followers did] by taking American undergraduates as representing [all] ‘human’ subjects and treating everyone else as some kind of aberration,” instead we can say, “ ‘OK, the human mind is much richer, there are so many more ways that humans can use their minds; and that also allows us to go and look for ways to expand our own thinking.’ So not just looking at other people and saying, ‘Oh, look how weird they think/how different they are.’ Turn the mirror on ourselves, too, and say ‘why do I think the things I think and how did I come to believe these things?’”
That questioning awareness, she says, “allows you the expansion to think differently but it also allows you the expansion to invent new ways of thinking or new ways of talking that suit the world you actually want to live in and not just the world you have been living in” (my emphasis). Learning and preserving languages can offer us a path out of authoritarianism.
When asked what language she’d next like to learn, Boroditsky says it would be the traditional language of the “Kumeyaay” people, who are the historical owners of the land of San Diego, including the unceded ancestral territory on which the University of California at San Diego was built (UCASD). That space has been her institutional home for a decade.
She says that the motivation to learn a language need not only be to learn something that will be heavily used around the world, but instead to learn something that is more fundamentally “good for the soul.” The Kumeyaay language holds that value for her. This insight underpins many contemporary efforts in Canada to revive Indigenous languages and cultures.
She further notes that “the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is.” And there is incredible flexibility and diversity of human thought across different linguistic communities. Such difference is tremendously valuable to retain.
“Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.” And we can create many more—we can create, hone and change to suit our needs. (Consider, for instance, the “languages” inspired by the “Harry Potter” novels and by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to name but two, quite mainstream, sources of new languages for Western youth.)
While Boroditsky’s insights read and sound so sensibly as part of post-structuralist philosophy, she knows the difficulty and complexity involved in preserving languages.
The tragedy is, however, that we’re losing linguistic diversity all the time. If, as scientists believe, we are losing one language per week, then, by some estimates, “half of the world’s languages will be gone in the next 100 years” (Boroditsky).
Even worse is the fact that almost all we know about the human mind and the human brain is based on studies of English-speaking, American undergraduates (following Chomsky and other American linguists), which excludes so much of the human race, whose faces are not white and whose names are not “John” and “Smith.”
Boroditsky concludes that what we know about the human mind is very narrow and biased and our cognitive, linguistic and other sciences must do better to analyze it.
“Speakers of different languages think differently.” That reality impacts and involves us all: “The language we speak shapes the way we think” (and not only vice-versa). So Boroditsky says, “our next question should be ‘Why do I think the way that I do? How could I think differently?’”
Also, “What thoughts do we wish to create” which will open us to the richness and differences that arise from diverse imagination and creativity?
So why do I, as a teacher of English-as-a-Second (or Additional) Language (ESL, EAL), listen to Boroditsky so closely? English has many permutations and all of them are valuable to learn and teach. But as someone who communicates primarily in a culturally dominant language (i.e. as an ESL coach, I know English continues to be described as the first language of international business). I should be aware of what Boroditski has proven: “The language we speak shapes the way we think” (and not the opposite)! Thinking and the expression of our thoughts, especially from minority, subordinated and endangered languages, matter–in these authoritarian political times–more than ever.
The survival of our species depends upon it.
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And now it’s your turn: what languages, other than English, have you seriously studied? Which ones do you now speak?
And how is the knowledge that “the language we speak shapes the way we think” reflected in your daily speaking and writing?
What can you do to help the thinking and speaking of minority languages and cultures to survive?
SHOP NEWS:
It was especially sweet to organize an informal “Praxis women’s” dinner event late last month, to celebrate and thank the four women who for years (if not decades) made Saskatchewan’s “startSMART” entrepreneurial training program possible: CVO Monica Kreuger; facilitator and coach, Deanna Litz; administrator, Elaine Mantyka; and administrative assistant, Silvana Cracogna.
My professional, personal and long-term thank you goes out, one more time, to Monica Kreuger.
As my long-time mentor and advisor through the Raj Manek Mentorship Program (RMMP), Monica has shared with me dozens of mentorly conversations and discussions, which have broadened my entrepreneurial thinking and helped me to foster perseverance.
The Praxis School of Entrepreneurship, where I facilitated business communications (2017-2020), and trained as a startSMART participant, myself (2018-19), has not ended, but is changing to provide its training opportunities for entrepreneurs, held alongside with other training ventures and technologies, including AI. “Global Praxis” continues to develop, at the Kreugers’ office base near Craik, Saskatchewan.
Friendly reunions of we Praxis women are likely to recur, from time-to-time. So I look forward to updating you on these amazing folks’ future developments.
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On the networking front, I’ve greatly enjoyed reconnecting with my U of S friend of 30 years, Paula Jane Remlinger (fellow English major, writer and former ESL teacher), who has shared ed a generous training and character reference for me for a third-party organization.
I look forward to hosting tea and conversation for Paula Jane, in upcoming weeks.
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Thanks also go out this month to friends of my writers’/small business group, so capably led now by local writer and communications expert, Ashleigh Mattern.
Ashleigh recently hiked a large part of Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland, after weeks of intensive training at Blackstrap. The hike has followed her hard-won recovery from cancer.
On a slightly smaller scale, she also generously gave me a beloved (and lovely) sun hat last summer that will help to protect me from the sunn’s UVA and UVB rays in future summers. Thank you, Ashleigh, and please remind me to buy you coffee when we next meet . . . . .
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A second note of appreciation goes to another colleague of the writers’/small biz group, Ashlyn George.
Ashlyn, a travel blogger, social media influencer and former Saskatchewanderer, shared her knowledge of local tourist attractions last July, which helped me to prepare some presentatons for newcomers to Saskatchewan.
Thank you, Ashlyn!
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Thanks go to my Ukrainian ESL student who is a refugee in Saskatoon. For the past six months, I have met her in weekly conversation classes, under the umbrella of a Toronto-based charity.
This student has been willing to practice not only speaking, but also to apply critical thinking skills. I appreciate feeling useful in the time I spend with her.
Occasional ESL tutoring of refugees, pro bono, is a way that I can “pay forward” in our community the generosity of folks who have mentored and advised me (notably Monica Kreuger, Sharon Wiseman, the above-named friends, and many others).
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Thanks also go out to both my IT consultant, Jordon, and to my bookkeeper, Heather, for assisting me in hardware upgrades and in recent months of book preparation.
Both have been attentive to detail in their support and make some complex thinking understandable, for which I remain grateful. I give them only first-class reviews for their amazing support!
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There are always new entrepreneurs to promote and new people to thank for their interest and support.
Please share your stories and acknowledgements of our generous community with me for upcoming issues.
But for now, this is a wrap for mid-September!
ABOUT US:
Between 2011 and December 2018, Elizabeth Shih Communications chronicled the stories of B2B marketing and communications on the Prairies and across the country.
Effective January 1, 2019, I rebranded as “Storytelling Communications.” I now coach new and economic immigrants in the English language, to help them get better jobs, secure larger contracts or get promoted more promptly and easily than they would without my support.
Interested in learning more? Please contact me through my CASL-compliant website (www.elizabethshih.com).
After I receive your message, I’ll be pleased to discuss projects with you!
Please visit my website for more information (www.storytellingcommunications.ca).
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