To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
To know a language, means to develop a capability to understand that culture's way of life, and therefore their way of thinking, which in turn changes the way that we think and our perceptions of the world. When one learns a new language his horizons are truly expanded. our awareness of a new outlook on life has potential to seriously alter our thought.
In a book called "Black skin, white masks" Franz Fanon examines the effect of language on colonized people. He believes that every colonized people, in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the "civilizing nation;" that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized person adapts his standards to adopt the colonizing people's cultural standards. In doing so, his identity, and his mental boundaries that he has lived by his entire life by are profoundly shaken. He now has a new outlook on life. Once this man acquires the new language, he no longer feels at home among his people. He now feels like he is better than them, and does not want to be associated with their primitivism. He now faces a serious identity struggle. I would say that his ideas were definitely affected on many various levels because of language.
In the end of the day, whether from a cultural perpective or otherwise. Language is thought.
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