Is English changing the way we think? With an estimated 1 in 5 people around the world now speaking English, the language has become the most widely used language in human history, The New Yorker writes. But what impact could English’s ever-expanding use have on the way we think, learn, and communicate?

The language’s position as the world’s lingua franca has long been controversial: The spread of English has long been accompanied by concerns about the loss of various other identities — particularly given that the language’s concepts are intimately tied to a particular anglicized Western culture and history of Western colonialism.

These concerns have not abated even as the exigencies of the global economy have increasingly mandated its learning and use,with English’s benefits — particularly in terms of employment — coming to pragmatically outweigh its more negative implications. Even France, long the most outspoken critic of English’s growing dominance, has in recent years mulled bringing English-medium classes into French universities, after many years of resisting the trend’s expansion in Europe.

English has had some advocates, however: Indian activists have promoted English learning and use among India’s Dalits — also known as “untouchables” — as a countermeasure against longtime discrimination against the group, which they say is embedded in Indian languages. Advocates hope that English’s high status in the country will afford Dalits greater respect and self-confidence, with prominent Dalit writer Chandra Bhan Prasad writing, “learning English has become the greatest mass movement the world has ever seen.”

Yet the question remains — what are the cognitive implications of English’s dominance? Much of the concern around the impact of English use on thought can be traced back to early linguists who theorized a direct relationship between speech and thought. The vestiges of these theories form the basis of claims that if a given language is particularly gendered, speakers are more likely to think in misogynistic terms, or if a language lacks a future tense, speakers will have no conception of the future.

These theories have largely been debunked, with academics like Stephen Pinker pointing out that common human experiences, like inventing new words for existing concepts, provide arguments against the idea that language always precedes thought. Yet language has also been shown to nudge — if not force — us in particular directions, with studies showing the vast array of ways in which different language speakers conceptualize space and time — with significant implications for what things we focus on and how we describe our world.

Despite its widespread adoption, the language is far from unitary. As English has traveled, it hasn’t stayed the same — local reworkings have integrated the language into the cultures to which it has spread, shaping it in turn. The proliferation of local twists on English around the world would seem to indicate that it’s not just speaking that shapes thinking, but thinking that shapes speaking as well.

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