(1) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that our language will mould our view of the world and consequently, different languages may probably express their unique ways of understanding the world. The hypothesis has two important points, linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism refers to the notion that a language determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive processes. Different languages offer people different ways of expressing around, they think and speak differently. Linguistic relativity refers to the notion that similarity between language is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be.

(2) Thus, two versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have been developed, a strong version and a weak version. The strong version of the theory emphasizes the decisive role of language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version of the hypothesis, however, is a modified type of its original theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture and thought, but the cross-culture differences thus produced in our ways of thinking are relative rather than categorical. So far, many researches and experiments conducted provide support to the weak version.

(3) Linguistic determinism, or the strong version, has been criticized for its excessive concern with surface structures of individual languages. In fact, all languages are fundamental of the same universal human character, including the lexical-semantic and syntactic components of language and all normal human beings are gifted with the same linguistic faculty and cognitive capacity. The flaws of that hypothesis can be revealed through the following analysis. ①Different grammatical structures do not mean that speakers of different languages differ in thinking logic or reasoning. ②Equivalent translation is always possible in spite of the fact that in practice there are hardly any people in perfect control of two genetically different languages. ③People who have good command of two genetic-unrelated languages do not have “double minds” or do not have to change their thinking logic when speaking foreign tongue.