Thought and Speech: Inner Language

Kai Froeb2026

This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.

Vygotsky’s main work “Thought and Language” (Myšlenie i reč’, 1934, published posthumously) analyzes the relationship between cognition and language. The thesis: thinking is not pre-linguistic. The animal thinks practically (finds solutions), but not conceptually. The human thinks in concepts – and concepts are linguistic.[1]

Development in the child:

  1. Pre-linguistic thought (0-2 years) – practical intelligence, tool use, but no symbols
  2. Pre-conceptual speech (1-3 years) – sounds, words, but no conceptual meaning (babbling)
  3. External speech (2-5 years) – social communication, the child speaks to others
  4. Egocentric speech (3-7 years) – the child speaks to itself, comments on its actions aloud
  5. Inner speech (from age 7) – speech is internalized, becomes thought

Egocentric speech is the key. Piaget had seen it as a relic – the child speaks to itself because it does not yet distinguish between self and world. Vygotsky shows: it is a transition – the child learns to use language as a tool of thought. Loud self-talk becomes quiet, becomes inaudible, becomes the inner voice. The social function (speaking with others) becomes the cognitive function (speaking to oneself = thinking).[2]

The systematic point: thinking is not the expression of pre-linguistic thoughts, but the product of language acquisition. The child does not think first and then formulate linguistically. The child learns to think by learning to speak. Language shapes cognition – not the other way around.[3]

This thesis is radically anti-Cartesian. Descartes: I think, therefore I am – thinking is primary, unquestionable, pre-linguistic. Vygotsky: the “I” that thinks is already linguistically constituted. There is no pre-linguistic self-consciousness. The self arises through the appropriation of social practice – and this is linguistically mediated.[4]

  1. Lev S. Vygotsky: Thought and Language (Myšlenie i reč’, 1934), German: Denken und Sprechen, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1964. Newer translation: Denken und Sprechen, Weinheim: Beltz, 2002. ↩︎

  2. Vygotsky: Denken und Sprechen, chap. 7: “Thought and Word,” pp. 286-359. On the critique of Piaget: pp. 19-81. ↩︎

  3. This thesis is systematically developed in: Vygotsky: Denken und Sprechen, p. 301: “The word is not the label that is stuck onto ready-made thought, but […] the immediate expression of thought.” ↩︎

  4. On the anti-Cartesian point see: Charles Taylor: “The Importance of Herder,” in: Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge/MA: Harvard UP, 1995, pp. 79-99, who draws the parallel between Herder and Vygotsky. ↩︎