The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who ruled from 1519 to 1556, is often claimed to have uttered the following: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.” The idea, of course, is that each language has a particular character associated with it, which lends itself to specific functions: Spanish is the Linguica Domnichi, literally ‘Language of God’; Italian is the ‘Language of Love’; French is the ‘Language of Diplomacy’; and German, with – some say – harsh, guttural sounds, is ideal for giving orders. But a number of researchers have gone further than this. It has been proposed that the distinct character of a language gives rise to wholesale differences in the way its native speakers think, and the manner in which we perceive the world: different languages entail a distinctive worldview. The way a language encodes space, time, colour, or any other domain has profound consequences for how its speakers perceive those domains of experience in their everyday lives. This idea is often referred to as linguistic relativity: differences across languages give rise to corresponding differences in how speakers of a given language think, and how they perceive the world.