DOES LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

DOES LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? Many feminists argue that using “he” as a pronoun where the actual sex of the person is unspecified diminishes women—that is, the word usage affects how we think about women. I agree, but the argument touches on a fierce dispute among linguists that has nothing to do with feminism. The Economist article on languages that I posted on here describes the dispute: “A fierce debate exists in linguistics between those, such as Noam Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in the brain and those… such as Benjamin Lee Whorf…[who think] that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s habits of thought.” (Whorf’s view is sometimes called “Whorfianism.”) This wikipedia article on linguistic relativity describes the debate. It cites Steven Pinker as a representative of the universalist school of thought and says that Pinker “argues that thought is independent of language, and that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in ‘natural’ language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, called ‘mentalese’”. Do I think in English? It seems to me that often I do, but I have the impression that the universalist school has the majority view.