Speaking now as a linguist, I am somewhat bothered by articles of this type—not because they're inaccurate, because they're entirely accurate, but because they walk a narrow line between fascination with and fetishization of language. Research does indicate that language and cognition are linked in a lot of ways, that's true; but the problem with overly aggressive Sapir-Whorf pushing is that it becomes all too easy to simplify the "language affects thought" maxim until it is no longer accurate.
For instance, the statement, "Languages affect how people conceptualize time," is true, according to research, while the statement, "[ethnic group] is the only group of people to feel [some overly specific emotion]," is never true, or at least hasn't been true all the many times I've seen it brought up. (Usually, such claims end up evoking the No True Scotsman fallacy when someone else suggests that maybe members of other ethnic groups are capable of feeling the emotion.) "Cognitive tasks like counting are affected by a person's language," is true, while Orwell's "You can make people more think less by making their language have a staccato rhythm," is not. There's a fine line to walk between recognizing that language and thought are interrelated, and thinking of language as the magical thought-producing-machine that completely determines all mental (and sometimes physiological) functioning.
Finally, a lot of people read "language" and therefore forget the importance of things like dialect and culture. There's a common tendency to become obsessed with 'untranslatability' as a marker of language and forget that a lot of untranslatable utterances are untranslatable not because of an inherent feature of their host language, but because language and culture are also deeply intertwined. If in Russian I made a joke about "preved" or discussed samizdat, and you didn't understand it in translation, it wouldn't be because of any inherent differences in the mental processes of Russian-speakers versus English-speakers, but instead because of cultural differences, which are an incredibly important part of communication.
This is my two cents, I suppose—the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a seductive idea and it's produced a lot of compelling research, but it's very easy to go too far with Sapir-Whorf and turn language into something much more powerful and more magical than it really is.
For instance, the statement, "Languages affect how people conceptualize time," is true, according to research, while the statement, "[ethnic group] is the only group of people to feel [some overly specific emotion]," is never true, or at least hasn't been true all the many times I've seen it brought up. (Usually, such claims end up evoking the No True Scotsman fallacy when someone else suggests that maybe members of other ethnic groups are capable of feeling the emotion.) "Cognitive tasks like counting are affected by a person's language," is true, while Orwell's "You can make people more think less by making their language have a staccato rhythm," is not. There's a fine line to walk between recognizing that language and thought are interrelated, and thinking of language as the magical thought-producing-machine that completely determines all mental (and sometimes physiological) functioning.
Finally, a lot of people read "language" and therefore forget the importance of things like dialect and culture. There's a common tendency to become obsessed with 'untranslatability' as a marker of language and forget that a lot of untranslatable utterances are untranslatable not because of an inherent feature of their host language, but because language and culture are also deeply intertwined. If in Russian I made a joke about "preved" or discussed samizdat, and you didn't understand it in translation, it wouldn't be because of any inherent differences in the mental processes of Russian-speakers versus English-speakers, but instead because of cultural differences, which are an incredibly important part of communication.
This is my two cents, I suppose—the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a seductive idea and it's produced a lot of compelling research, but it's very easy to go too far with Sapir-Whorf and turn language into something much more powerful and more magical than it really is.