Abstract: In a grand way, the history can be either divided into agricultural society, industrial society and so on according to the criterion of material culture, or divided into slave society, feudal society and so on according to the criterion of institutional culture. This paper, however, proposes a division criterion of “language-thinking”, which can be defined as language, the way of thinking with language, and the cognition involved with linguistic thinking. Consequently, we can distinguish the fourth culture of language-thinking from material, institutional and spiritual culture. With the five breakthroughs in “language-thinking”, the grand history can be divided into six phases: the pre-linguistic phase, the phase of linguistic culture, the phase of civilization, the phase of rational culture, the phase of scientific culture, and the emerging phase of AI. This paper also analyzes the features of each phase of language-thinking culture by comparison.

Key words: language, linguistic thinking, the fourth kind of culture, six phases in a cultural history