Interestingly the theory of restricting language to control thought has been debunked. But personally, I do think that our range of acceptable speech can impact our thoughts in more subtle ways both positive and negative.
There has never been any proof for it, and the scraps of data that point in the direction of a weak version of Sapir-Whorff all suffer from the usual psychology research flaws (cf. replication crisis).
If there's any way in which word usage influences our thoughts, there's not much evidence of it. E.g., there are ungendered languages, but the societies that use them are absolutely not more feminist than those where a gendered language is spoken. And suppressing slurs usually leads to substitution by other words, showing that the thought very much stays alive, independent of the word.
The two examples you give don't disprove weak Sapir-Whorf, they disprove strong Sapir-Whorf. Almost no one who knows what they're talking about argues that language is the deciding factor in sexism or racism. Linguistic relativity is widely accepted, and that's the idea that language has an influence on your thought patterns.
There can be other influences that lead to misogyny and other biases, and language may adapt to give expression to those thought patterns. But language also can influence thought patterns. For it not to do so it would have to be the lone exception among all of the stimulae we take in, which is extremely unlikely.
Sapir-Whorf almost can't be disproved. There's no point in disproving it. But where's the evidence?
> the idea that language has an influence on your thought patterns.
What does language even mean in that statement? You can weaken it down all you want, but in the context of this topic, language means: word usage, and thoughts mean: racist, sexist, etc. opinions. Do these opinions get influenced by e.g. the food you eat? The sunset? The temperature of your living room? Those are stimuli, or at least external influences. Language is not a stimulus, but more of a skill. It's encoded in your brain, and it allows you to communicate.
To put it bluntly: is there any evidence that people who are forced to use "black" instead of "African-American" become less racist?
It doesn't disprove it, but that's not sufficient, is it? Is your argument about their (lack of) number system? Before we could speak, we had no knowledge of numbers, according to this theory. How did we ever get beyond that? Aliens?
I honestly can't find the article that cited the sources right now, so it's gonna have to be a trust me on this one. My google skills are failing me right now.
> The strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that people from different cultures think differently because of differences in their languages. ... Few sociolinguists would accept such a strong claim, but most accept the weaker claim of linguistic relativity, that language influences perceptions, thought, and, at least potentially, behavior.
And this:
> Linguistic relativity proposals are sometimes characterized as equivalent to linguistic determinism, that is the view that all thought is strictly determined by language. Such characterizations of the language–thought linkage bear little resemblance to the proposals of Sapir or Whorf, who spoke in more general terms about language influencing habitual patterns of thought, especially at the conceptual level. Indeed, no serious scholar working on the linguistic relativity problem as such has subscribed to a strict determinism.
My sense has long been that Sapir-Whorf is "debunked" in the popular consciousness but not among actual linguists, in part because of the confusion of linguistic determinism with linguistic relativity. Pop-sci sources characterize Sapir-Whorf as wholly deterministic, which it isn't and never was.
In the end, I'll trust my own gut on Sapir-Whorf over what the academy comes up with anyway, because there's a strong incentive to "disprove" it because it doesn't align with their current political values. My gut says that for linguistic relativity to not be true, language would have to be unique among all of our environmental stimulae in not influencing our thought patterns, and the odds of something so fundamental to our species being the lone exception are pretty darn slim.
