Hardly any other assumption was shared by so many streams of twentieth century philosophy as the view that language plays the central role in human interactions with the world. The phrase “linguistic turn” is usually employed to refer to the various forms of philosophical interest in language deriving from this position—for instance, the belief that all philosophical problems are problems of language or that all thinking is verbal. Much of architectural theory of the last decades of the twentieth century (such as deconstruction or various phenomenological positions) was also built on philosophical positions that emphasised the primacy of language (over, for instance, visual experience). The fact that by the beginning of the twenty-first century the linguistic turn has run out of steam, and that very few philosophers today subscribe to the view that all thinking is a linguistic affair thus invalidates much of the work in architectural theory that has accumulated for the past half a century. The paper analyses the consequences of the demise philosophical faith in language for contemporary architectural theory.