Does Language Reflect The World Around Us Through Language?

How do we perceive the world around us through language?

Does language reflect the world around us or does it create it? This is the question I asked myself when thinking about the way we use language in our daily life. So, what do I mean with “reflecting” or “creating” the world? With reflecting the world I mean that the main purpose of language is explaining what we touch, taste, feel, hear and see around us in our daily life. With creating the world I mean that the main purpose of it is to shape the world as we know it. That language is the tool that we, humans, have to twist the world into the shape and way we desire and need it to be to fit our everyday schedule.

So, why am I interested to know the answer to this question? I am interested

Since I am Dutch-English bilingual myself, I started to wonder if knowing a second language might change your perspective of the world around you. I must say, for myself this is definitely the case. When I learned my second language over the course of a few years I have found countless new ways to describe things that I already knew. I found many ways to describe a feeling or phenomena in my second language that only have one description or name in my first language. This made me look at the world in a different way then when I grew up. I found the beauty in the description of phenomena that I found to be dull in my own language. I learned that anything could be beautiful, if you only look at it with the right eyes and tools. Knowing second language made the world more vibrant for me. Knowing a second language made the world more interesting for me then when I grew up. Now, I see an object and have two ways to describe it, two tools. I learned to pick the one that I found to be the most beautiful. That way, I could create the world to be as beautiful as I wanted it to be. So I would say that in this case, language definitely created the world for