Swarms, floods and marauders: the toxic metaphors of the migration debate | David Shariatmadari

We're not being 'overwhelmed' by a 'tidal wave' of migrants. How can anyone justify this callous, misleading language?

Does language change the way you think? It's a question that has occupied the finest academic minds for decades. There's even a name for it: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after anthropologist Edward Sapir and fire-insurance official Benjamin Lee Whorf. The latter, a linguist in his spare time, believed that Native Americans thought in a completely different way to Europeans because of the way their grammar worked. Most experts now agree that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong: the language you use does not determine the ideas in your head. However, studies have shown that it can influence them in important ways, setting up subtle habits of which you are probably unaware.

All very interesting, a sort of linguistic curio. Except that the ability to influence thought matters a great deal. George Orwell recognised this, inventing Newspeak to illustrate how, in one nightmare scenario, language could be used as an instrument of control. We're not there yet, but if we want to maintain the ability to think clearly and independently about migration, there's good reason to be wary of some of the vocabulary now being bandied about.