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Linguistic relativity

February 03, 2023

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /səˌpɪər ˈwɔːrf/, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.[1] Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity,[2] and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists.[3]

Many different, often contradictory variations of the hypothesis have existed throughout its history.[4] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This hypothesis was held by some of the early linguists before World War II.[3] This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[2]

Although common, the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.[5][6]

The principle of linguistic relativity and the relationship between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages.

History

The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder, who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. Members of the early 20th-century school of American anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also embraced forms of the idea to a certain extent, including in a 1928 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America,[7] but Sapir in particular, wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism. Sapir's student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, came to be seen as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior. Harry Hoijer, another of Sapir's students, introduced the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis",[8] even though the two scholars never formally advanced any such hypothesis.[9] A strong version of relativist theory was developed from the late 1920s by the German linguist Leo Weisgerber. Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg who conducted experiments designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently.

As the study of the universal nature of human language and cognition came into focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of favor among linguists. From the late 1980s, a new school of linguistic relativity scholars has examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for non-deterministic versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.[10][11] Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains, although they are generally weak. Currently, a balanced view of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better seen as arising from connectionist factors. Research is focused on exploring the ways and extent to which language influences thought.[10]

Ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment

The idea that language and thought are intertwined is ancient. In his dialogue Cratylus, Plato explores the idea that conceptions of reality, such as Heraclitean flux, are embedded in language. But Plato has been read as arguing against sophist thinkers such as Gorgias of Leontini, who held that the physical world cannot be experienced except through language; this made the question of truth dependent on aesthetic preferences or functional consequences. Plato may have held instead that the world consisted of eternal ideas and that language should reflect these ideas as accurately as possible.[12] Nevertheless, Plato's Seventh Letter claims that ultimate truth is inexpressible in words.

Following Plato, St. Augustine, for example, held the view that language was merely labels applied to already existing concepts. This view remained prevalent throughout the Middle Ages.[13] Roger Bacon held the opinion that language was but a veil covering up eternal truths, hiding them from human experience. For Immanuel Kant, language was but one of several tools used by humans to experience the world.

German Romantic philosophers

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence of different national characters, or Volksgeister, of different ethnic groups was the moving force behind the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism.[14]

Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg inspired several of the German Romantics. As early as 1749, he alludes to something along the lines of linguistic relativity in commenting on a passage in the table of nations in the book of Genesis:

"Everyone according to his language, according to their families, as to their nations." [Genesis 10:5] This signifies that these were according to the genius of each; "according to their language," according to the opinion of each.... "Language," in its inner meaning, signifies opinion, thus principles and persuasions. This is because there is a correspondence of the language with the intellectual part of man, or with his thought, like that of an effect with its cause.[15]

In 1771 he spelled this out more explicitly:

There is a common genius prevailing among those who are subject to one king, and who consequently are under one constitutional law. Germany is divided into more governments than the neighboring kingdoms.... However, a common genius prevails everywhere among people speaking the same language.[16]

Johann Georg Hamann is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to speak of the concept of "the genius of a language."[17][18] In his "Essay Concerning an Academic Question", Hamann suggests that a people's language affects their worldview:

The lineaments of their language will thus correspond to the direction of their mentality.[19]

In 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt connected the study of language to the national romanticist program by proposing the view that language is the fabric of thought. Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker's native language.[20] This view was part of a larger picture in which the world view of an ethnic nation, their "Weltanschauung", was seen as being faithfully reflected in the grammar of their language. Von Humboldt argued that languages with an inflectional morphological type, such as German, English and the other Indo-European languages, were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the dominance of their speakers over the speakers of less perfect languages. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.[20]

In Humboldt's humanistic understanding of linguistics, each language creates the individual's worldview in its particular way through its lexical and grammatical categories, conceptual organization, and syntactic models.[21]

Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human/rational or a divine origin.[22] Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied to various languages to expand on the hypothesis.

Boas and Sapir

The idea that some languages are superior to others and that lesser languages maintained their speakers in intellectual poverty was widespread in the early 20th century.[23] American linguist William Dwight Whitney, for example, actively strove to eradicate Native American languages, arguing that their speakers were savages and would be better off learning English and adopting a "civilized" way of life.[24] The first anthropologist and linguist to challenge this view was Franz Boas.[25] While undertaking geographical research in northern Canada he became fascinated with the Inuit and decided to become an ethnographer. Boas stressed the equal worth of all cultures and languages, that there was no such thing as a primitive language and that all languages were capable of expressing the same content, albeit by widely differing means.[26] Boas saw language as an inseparable part of culture and he was among the first to require of ethnographers to learn the native language of the culture under study and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends in the original language.[27][28]

Boas:

It does not seem likely [...] that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language."[29]

Boas' student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that languages contained the key to understanding the world views of peoples.[30] He espoused the viewpoint that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation. Sapir also thought because language represented reality differently, it followed that the speakers of different languages would perceive reality differently.

Sapir:

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.[31]

On the other hand, Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating, "It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language."[32]

Sapir was explicit that the connections between language and culture were neither thoroughgoing nor particularly deep, if they existed at all:

It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture; closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas... The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves.[33]

Sapir offered similar observations about speakers of so-called "world" or "modern" languages, noting, "possession of a common language is still and will continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual understanding between England and America, but it is very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence. A common language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the geographical, physical, and economics determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout the area."[34]

While Sapir never made a point of studying directly how languages affected thought, some notion of (probably "weak") linguistic relativity underlay his basic understanding of language, and would be taken up by Whorf.[35]

Independent developments in Europe

Drawing on influences such as Humboldt and Friedrich Nietzsche, some European thinkers developed ideas similar to those of Sapir and Whorf, generally working in isolation from each other. Prominent in Germany from the late 1920s through into the 1960s were the strongly relativist theories of Leo Weisgerber and his key concept of a 'linguistic inter-world', mediating between external reality and the forms of a given language, in ways peculiar to that language.[36] Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky read Sapir's work and experimentally studied the ways in which the development of concepts in children was influenced by structures given in language. His 1934 work "Thought and Language"[37] has been compared to Whorf's and taken as mutually supportive evidence of language's influence on cognition.[38] Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics that has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity.[39] Though influential in their own right, this work has not been influential in the debate on linguistic relativity, which has tended to center on the American paradigm exemplified by Sapir and Whorf.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Main article: Benjamin Lee Whorf

More than any linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he called the "linguistic relativity principle".[40] Studying Native American languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language-use differences affected perception. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the relation between language and thought remain under contention. However, a version of theory holds some "merit," for example, "different words mean different things in different languages; not every word in every language has a one-to-one exact translation in a different language"[41] Critics such as Lenneberg,.[42] Black, and Pinker[43] attribute to Whorf a strong linguistic determinism, while Lucy, Silverstein and Levinson point to Whorf's explicit rejections of determinism, and where he contends that translation and commensuration are possible.

Detractors such as Lenneberg,[42] Chomsky and Pinker[44] criticized him for insufficient clarity in his description of how language influences thought, and for not proving his conjectures. Most of his arguments were in the form of anecdotes and speculations that served as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were connected to what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. In Whorf's words:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.[45]

 
Whorf's illustration of the difference between the English and Shawnee gestalt construction of cleaning a gun with a ramrod. From the article "Science and Linguistics", originally published in the MIT Technology Review, 1940.

Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of less-studied languages).

One of Whorf's examples was the supposedly large number of words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, an example which later was contested as a misrepresentation.[46]

Another is the Hopi language's words for water, one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water.[47] These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts such as snow or water, is not always possible.[48]

Another example is from Whorf's experience as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector.[46] While inspecting a chemical plant he observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels, no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous because of the highly flammable vapors still in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word empty in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regard them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg[42] as not actually demonstrating causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead was an example of circular reasoning. Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human insight rather than language.[44]

Whorf's most elaborate argument for linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[49] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years," but rather as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns. Ekkehart Malotki later claimed that he had found no evidence of Whorf's claims in 1980's era speakers, nor in historical documents dating back to the arrival of Europeans. Malotki used evidence from archaeological data, calendars, historical documents, and modern speech; he concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time in the way Whorf suggested. Universalist scholars such as Pinker often see Malotki's study as a final refutation of Whorf's claim about Hopi, whereas relativist scholars such as Lucy and Penny Lee criticized Malotki's study for mischaracterizing Whorf's claims and for forcing Hopi grammar into a model of analysis that doesn't fit the data.[50]

Whorf's argument about Hopi speakers’ conceptualization about time is an example of the structure-centered approach to research into linguistic relativity, which Lucy identified as one of three main strands of research in the field.[51] The "structure-centered" approach starts with a language's structural peculiarity and examines its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The defining example is Whorf's observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is Lucy's research describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by English speakers.[52] However, philosophers including Donald Davidson and Jason Josephson Storm have argued that Whorf's Hopi examples are self-refuting, as Whorf had to translate Hopi terms into English in order to explain how they are untranslatable.[53]

Whorf died in 1941 at age 44, leaving multiple unpublished papers. His line of thought was continued by linguists and anthropologists such as Hoijer and Lee, who both continued investigations into the effect of language on habitual thought, and Trager, who prepared a number of Whorf's papers for posthumous publishing. The most important event for the dissemination of Whorf's ideas to a larger public was the publication in 1956 of his major writings on the topic of linguistic relativity in a single volume titled Language, Thought and Reality.

Brown and Lenneberg

In 1953, Eric Lenneberg criticized Whorf's examples from an objectivist view of language holding that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world and that even though languages express these ideas in various ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are equivalent. He argued that Whorf's English descriptions of a Hopi speaker's view of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English, therefore disproving linguistic relativity. However Whorf was concerned with how the habitual use of language influences habitual behavior, rather than translatability. Whorf's point was that while English speakers may be able to understand how a Hopi speaker thinks, they do not think in that way.[54]

Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he never showed the connection between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental phenomenon. With Brown, Lenneberg proposed that proving such a connection required directly matching linguistic phenomena with behavior. They assessed linguistic relativity experimentally and published their findings in 1954.

Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated a formal hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated their own. Their two tenets were (i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure".[55] Brown later developed them into the so-called "weak" and "strong" formulation:

  • Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the language.
  • The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language.[56]

Brown's formulations became widely known and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.

Joshua Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind"

Joshua Fishman argued that Whorf's true position was largely overlooked. In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a "neo-Herderian champion"[57] and in 1982, he proposed "Whorfianism of the third kind" in an attempt to refocus linguists' attention on what he claimed was Whorf's real interest, namely the intrinsic value of "little peoples" and "little languages".[58] Whorf had criticized Ogden's Basic English thus:

But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English […] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. […] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness.[59]

Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language influences thought and the strong version that language determines thought, Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" proposes that language is a key to culture.

Leiden School

The Leiden School is a linguistic theory that models languages as parasites. Notable proponent Frederik Kortlandt, in a 1985 paper outlining Leiden School theory, advocates for a form of linguistic relativity: "The observation that in all Yuman languages the word for ‘work’ is a loan from Spanish should be a major blow to any current economic theory." In the following paragraph, he directly quotes from Sapir: "Even in the most primitive cultures the strategic word is likely to be more powerful than the direct blow."[60]

Rethinking Linguistic Relativity

The publication of the 1996 anthology Rethinking Linguistic Relativity edited by Gumperz and Levinson began a new period of linguistic relativity studies that focused on cognitive and social aspects. The book included studies on linguistic relativity and universalist traditions. Levinson documented significant linguistic relativity effects in the different linguistic conceptualization of spatial categories in different languages. For example, men speaking the Guugu Yimithirr language in Queensland gave accurate navigation instructions using a compass-like system of north, south, east and west, along with a hand gesture pointing to the starting direction.[61]

Lucy defines this approach as “domain-centered” because researchers select a semantic domain and compare it across linguistic and cultural groups.[51] Space is another semantic domain that has proven fruitful for linguistic relativity studies.[62] Spatial categories vary greatly across languages. Speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many ordinary tasks. Levinson and others reported three basic spatial categorizations. While many languages use combinations of them, some languages exhibit only one type and related behaviors. For example, Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations — the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. Speakers define a location as "north of the house", while an English speaker may use relative positions, saying "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house".[63]

Separate studies by Bowerman and Slobin analyzed the role of language in cognitive processes. Bowerman showed that certain cognitive processes did not use language to any significant extent and therefore could not be subject to linguistic relativity.[clarification needed][64] Slobin described another kind of cognitive process that he named "thinking for speaking" — the kind of process in which perceptional data and other kinds of prelinguistic cognition are translated into linguistic terms for communication.[clarification needed] These, Slobin argues, are the kinds of cognitive process that are at the root of linguistic relativity.[65]

Colour terminology

Main article: Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate

Since Brown and Lenneberg believed that the objective reality denoted by language was the same for speakers of all languages, they decided to test how different languages codified the same message differently and whether differences in codification could be proven to affect behavior. Brown and Lenneberg designed experiments involving the codification of colors. In their first experiment, they investigated whether it was easier for speakers of English to remember color shades for which they had a specific name than to remember colors that were not as easily definable by words. This allowed them to compare the linguistic categorization directly to a non-linguistic task. In a later experiment, speakers of two languages that categorize colors differently (English and Zuni) were asked to recognize colors. In this way, it could be determined whether the differing color categories of the two speakers would determine their ability to recognize nuances within color categories. Brown and Lenneberg found that Zuni speakers who classify green and blue together as a single color did have trouble recognizing and remembering nuances within the green/blue category.[66] This approach, which Lucy later classified as domain-centered,[51] is acknowledged to be sub-optimal, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is hardwired into the neural system and as such is subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains.

In a similar study done by German ophthalmologist Hugo Magnus, he circulated a questionnaire to missionaries and traders with ten standardized color samples and instructions for using them in the 1870s. These instructions contained an explicit warning that failure of a language to distinguish lexically between two colors did not necessarily imply that speakers of that language did not distinguish the two colors perceptually. Magnus received completed questionnaires on twenty-five African, fifteen Asian, three Australian, and two European languages. He concluded in part, ‘As regards the range of the color sense of the primitive peoples tested with our questionnaire, it appears in general to remain within the same bounds as the color sense of the civilized nations. At least, we could not establish a complete lack of the perception of the so-called main colors as a special racial characteristic of any one of the tribes investigated for us. We consider red, yellow, green, and blue as the main representatives of the colors of long and short wavelength; among the tribes we tested not a one lacks the knowledge of any of these four colors’ (Magnus 1880, p. 6, as trans. in Berlin and Kay 1969, p. 141). Magnus did find widespread lexical neutralization of green and blue, that is, a single word covering both these colors, as have all subsequent comparative studies of color lexicons.[67]

Brown and Lenneberg's study began a tradition of investigation of linguistic relativity through color terminology. The studies showed a correlation between color term numbers and ease of recall in both Zuni and English speakers. Researchers attributed this to focal colors having higher codability than less focal colors, and not with linguistic relativity effects. Berlin/Kay found universal typological color principles that are determined by biological rather than linguistic factors.[68] This study sparked studies into typological universals of color terminology. Researchers such as Lucy,[51] Saunders[69] and Levinson[70] argued that Berlin and Kay's study does not refute linguistic relativity in color naming, because of unsupported assumptions in their study (such as whether all cultures in fact have a clearly defined category of "color") and because of related data problems. Researchers such as Maclaury continued investigation into color naming. Like Berlin and Kay, Maclaury concluded that the domain is governed mostly by physical-biological universals.[71][72]

Studies by Berlin and Kay continued Lenneberg's color research. They studied color terminology formation and showed clear universal trends in color naming. For example, they found that even though languages have different color terminologies, they generally recognize certain hues as more focal than others. They showed that in languages with few color terms, it is predictable from the number of terms which hues are chosen as focal colors, for example, languages with only three color terms always have the focal colors black, white and red.[68] The fact that what had been believed to be random differences between color naming in different languages could be shown to follow universal patterns was seen as a powerful argument against linguistic relativity.[73] Berlin and Kay's research has since been criticized by relativists such as Lucy, who argued that Berlin and Kay's conclusions were skewed by their insistence that color terms encode only color information.[74] This, Lucy argues, made them blind to the instances in which color terms provided other information that might be considered examples of linguistic relativity.

Universalism

Universalist scholars ushered in a period of dissent from ideas about linguistic relativity. Lenneberg was one of the first cognitive scientists to begin development of the Universalist theory of language that was formulated by Chomsky as universal grammar, effectively arguing that all languages share the same underlying structure. The Chomskyan school also holds the belief that linguistic structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific languages are surface phenomena that do not affect the brain's universal cognitive processes. This theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s, while linguistic relativity became the object of ridicule.[75]

Other universalist researchers dedicated themselves to dispelling other aspects of linguistic relativity, often attacking Whorf's specific points and examples. For example, Malotki's monumental study of time expressions in Hopi presented many examples that challenged Whorf's "timeless" interpretation of Hopi language and culture,[76] but seemingly failed to address linguistic relativist argument actually posed by Whorf (i.e. that the understanding of time by native Hopi speakers differed from that of speakers of European languages due to the differences in the organization and construction of their respective languages; Whorf never claimed that Hopi speakers lacked any concept of time).[77] Malotki himself acknowledges that the conceptualizations are different, but because he ignores Whorf's use of scare quotes around the word "time" and the qualifier "what we call," takes Whorf to be arguing that the Hopi have no concept of time at all.[78][79][80]

Today many followers of the universalist school of thought still oppose linguistic relativity. For example, Pinker argues in The Language Instinct that thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, called "mentalese." Pinker attacks what he calls "Whorf's radical position," declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make."[44]

Pinker and other universalists have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen.[81][74][54]

Cognitive linguistics

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, advances in cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.[82] One of those who adopted a more Whorfian approach was George Lakoff. He argued that language is often used metaphorically and that languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think. For example, English employs conceptual metaphors likening time with money, so that time can be saved and spent and invested, whereas other languages do not talk about time in that way. Other such metaphors are common to many languages because they are based on general human experience, for example, metaphors associating up with good and bad with down. Lakoff also argued that metaphor plays an important part in political debates such as the "right to life" or the "right to choose"; or "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers".[83]

Parameters

In his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind,[54] Lakoff reappraised linguistic relativity and especially Whorf's views about how linguistic categorization reflects and/or influences mental categories. He concluded that the debate had been confused. He described four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions about what constitutes linguistic relativity:

  • The degree and depth of linguistic relativity. Perhaps a few examples of superficial differences in language and associated behavior are enough to demonstrate the existence of linguistic relativity. Alternatively, perhaps only deep differences that permeate the linguistic and cultural system suffice.
  • Whether conceptual systems are absolute or whether they can evolve
  • Whether the similarity criterion is translatability or the use of linguistic expressions
  • Whether the focus of linguistic relativity is in language or in the brain

Lakoff concluded that many of Whorf's critics had criticized him using novel definitions of linguistic relativity, rendering their criticisms moot.

Refinements

Researchers such as Boroditsky, Choi, Majid, Lucy and Levinson believe that language influences thought in more limited ways than the broadest early claims. Researchers examine the interface between thought (or cognition), language and culture and describe the relevant influences. They use experimental data to back up their conclusions.[84][85] Kay ultimately concluded that "[the] Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left".[86] His findings show that accounting for brain lateralization offers another perspective.

Behavior-centered research

Recent studies have also taken the "behavior centered" approach, which starts by comparing behavior across linguistic groups and then searches for causes for that behavior in the linguistic system.[51] In an early example of this approach, Whorf attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of the word 'empty' to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors.

More recently, Bloom noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counterfactual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. He concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in Chinese. Other researchers attributed this result to Bloom's flawed translations.[87] Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process while Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker.[88]

Everett's work on the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon[89] found several peculiarities that he interpreted as corresponding to linguistically rare features, such as a lack of numbers and color terms in the way those are otherwise defined and the absence of certain types of clauses. Everett's conclusions were met with skepticism from universalists[90] who claimed that the linguistic deficit is explained by the lack of need for such concepts.[91]

Recent research with non-linguistic experiments in languages with different grammatical properties (e.g., languages with and without numeral classifiers or with different gender grammar systems) showed that language differences in human categorization are due to such differences.[92] Experimental research suggests that this linguistic influence on thought diminishes over time, as when speakers of one language are exposed to another.[93]

A study published by the American Psychological Association's Journal of Experimental Psychology claimed that language can influence how one estimates time. The study focused on three groups, those who spoke only Swedish, those who spoke only Spanish and bilingual speakers who spoke both of those languages. Swedish speakers describe time using distance terms like "long" or "short" while Spanish speakers do it using quantity related terms like "a lot" or "little". The researchers asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed while watching a line growing across a screen, or a container being filled, or both. The researchers stated that "When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity." When the bilinguals were prompted with the word "duración" (the Spanish word for duration) they based their time estimates of how full the containers were, ignoring the growing lines. When prompted with the word "tid" (the Swedish word for duration) they estimated the time elapsed solely by the distance the lines had traveled.[94][95]

Kashima & Kashima showed that people living in countries where spoken languages often drop pronouns (such as Japanese) tend to have more collectivistic values than those who use non–pronoun drop languages such as English. They argued that the explicit reference to “you” and “I” reminds speakers the distinction between the self and other.[96]

A 2013 study found that those who speak "futureless" languages with no grammatical marking of the future tense save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese than those who do not.[97] This effect has come to be called the linguistic-savings hypothesis and has been replicated in several cross-cultural and cross-country studies. However, a study of Chinese, which can be spoken both with and without the grammatical future marking "will", found that subjects do not behave more impatiently when “will” is used repetitively. This laboratory-based finding of elective variation within a single language does not refute the linguistic savings hypothesis but some have suggested that it shows the effect may be due to culture or other non-linguistic factors.[98]

Psycholinguistic research

Psycholinguistic studies explored motion perception, emotion perception, object representation and memory.[99][100][101][102] The gold standard of psycholinguistic studies on linguistic relativity is now finding non-linguistic cognitive differences[example needed] in speakers of different languages (thus rendering inapplicable Pinker's criticism that linguistic relativity is "circular").

Recent work with bilingual speakers attempts to distinguish the effects of language from those of culture on bilingual cognition including perceptions of time, space, motion, colors and emotion.[103] Researchers described differences[example needed] between bilinguals and monolinguals in perception of color,[104] representations of time[105] and other elements of cognition.

One experiment found that speakers of languages without numbers greater than two had difficulty counting the number of taps, for example, making more errors distinguishing between six and seven taps.[106] Presumably this is because they could not track the taps using numbers repeated in the phonological loop.

Other domains

Linguistic relativity inspired others to consider whether thought and emotion could be influenced by manipulating language.

Science and philosophy

The question bears on philosophical, psychological, linguistic and anthropological questions.[clarification needed]

A major question is whether human psychological faculties are mostly innate or whether they are mostly a result of learning, and hence subject to cultural and social processes such as language. The innate view holds that humans share the same set of basic faculties, and that variability due to cultural differences is less important and that the human mind is a mostly biological construction, so that all humans sharing the same neurological configuration can be expected to have similar cognitive patterns.

Multiple alternatives have advocates. The contrary constructivist position holds that human faculties and concepts are largely influenced by socially constructed and learned categories, without many biological restrictions. Another variant is idealist, which holds that human mental capacities are generally unrestricted by biological-material structures. Another is essentialist, which holds that essential differences[clarification needed] may influence the ways individuals or groups experience and conceptualize the world. Yet another is relativist (cultural relativism), which sees different cultural groups as employing different conceptual schemes that are not necessarily compatible or commensurable, nor more or less in accord with external reality.[107]

Another debate considers whether thought is a form of internal speech or is independent of and prior to language.[108]

In the philosophy of language the question addresses the relations between language, knowledge and the external world, and the concept of truth. Philosophers such as Putnam, Fodor, Davidson, and Dennett see language as representing directly entities from the objective world and that categorization reflect that world. Other philosophers (e.g. Quine, Searle, and Foucault) argue that categorization and conceptualization is subjective and arbitrary. Another view, represented by Storm, seeks a third way by emphasizing how language changes and imperfectly represents reality without being completely divorced from ontology.[109]

Another question is whether language is a tool for representing and referring to objects in the world, or whether it is a system used to construct mental representations that can be communicated.[clarification needed]

Therapy and self-development

Main articles: General semantics and neuro-linguistic programming

Sapir/Whorf contemporary Alfred Korzybski was independently developing his theory of general semantics, which was aimed at using language's influence on thinking to maximize human cognitive abilities. Korzybski's thinking was influenced by logical philosophy such as Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.[110] Although Korzybski was not aware of Sapir and Whorf's writings, the movement was followed by Whorf-admirer Stuart Chase, who fused Whorf's interest in cultural-linguistic variation with Korzybski's programme in his popular work "The Tyranny of Words". S. I. Hayakawa was a follower and popularizer of Korzybski's work, writing Language in Thought and Action. The general semantics movement influenced the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), another therapeutic technique that seeks to use awareness of language use to influence cognitive patterns.[111]

Korzybski independently described a "strong" version of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity.[112]

We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s[emantic] r[eactions] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us.

— Korzybski (1930)[113]

Artificial languages

Main articles: Constructed languages and Experimental languages

In their fiction, authors such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell explored how linguistic relativity might be exploited for political purposes. In Rand's Anthem, a fictive communist society removed the possibility of individualism by removing the word "I" from the language.[114] In Orwell's 1984 the authoritarian state created the language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think critically about the government, or even to contemplate that they might be impoverished or oppressed, by reducing the number of words to reduce the thought of the locutor.[115]

Others have been fascinated by the possibilities of creating new languages that could enable new, and perhaps better, ways of thinking. Examples of such languages designed to explore the human mind include Loglan, explicitly designed by James Cooke Brown to test the linguistic relativity hypothesis, by experimenting whether it would make its speakers think more logically. Speakers of Lojban, an evolution of Loglan, report that they feel speaking the language enhances their ability for logical thinking[citation needed]. Suzette Haden Elgin, who was involved in the early development of neuro-linguistic programming, invented the language Láadan to explore linguistic relativity by making it easier to express what Elgin considered the female worldview, as opposed to Standard Average European languages which she considered to convey a "male centered" world view.[116] John Quijada's language Ithkuil was designed to explore the limits of the number of cognitive categories a language can keep its speakers aware of at once.[117] Similarly, Sonja Lang's Toki Pona was developed according to a Taoist point of view for exploring how (or if) such a language would direct human thought.[118]

Programming languages

APL programming language originator Kenneth E. Iverson believed that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages (without actually mentioning it by name). His Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms.[non-primary source needed][119]

The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes, such as a conceptual hierarchy of computer languages, with more expressive and succinct languages at the top. Thus, the so-called blub paradox (after a hypothetical programming language of average complexity called Blub) says that anyone preferentially using some particular programming language will know that it is more powerful than some, but not that it is less powerful than others. The reason is that writing in some language means thinking in that language. Hence the paradox, because typically programmers are "satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs".[120]

In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel-17, based on the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis.[121]

Science fiction

Numerous examples of linguistic relativity have appeared in science fiction.

  • The totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty Four in effect acts on the basis of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, seeking to replace English with Newspeak, a language constructed specifically with the intention that thoughts subversive of the regime cannot be expressed in it, and therefore people educated to speak and think in it would not have such thoughts.
  • In his 1958 science fiction novel The Languages of Pao the author Jack Vance describes how specialized languages are a major part of a strategy to create specific classes in a society, to enable the population to withstand occupation and develop itself.
  • In Samuel R. Delany's 1966 science fiction novel,Babel-17, the author describes a highly advanced, information-dense language that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought.[122]
  • Ted Chiang's 1998 short story "Story of Your Life" developed the concept of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis as applied to an alien species which visits Earth. The aliens' biology contributes to their spoken and written languages, which are distinct. In the 2016 American film Arrival, based on Chiang's short story, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the premise. The protagonist explains that "the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the theory that the language you speak determines how you think".[123]
  • Gene Wolfe's four volume science fiction novel The Book of the New Sun describes the North American "Ascian" people as speaking a language composed entirely of quotations that have been approved by a small ruling class.

Sociolinguistics and linguistic relativity

The way in which sociolinguistics[124] plays a role in variables within language, like the way words are pronounced, word selection in certain dialogue, context, and tone, suggests it may have implications for linguistic relativity.

See also

Citations

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    • Whorf, Benjamin Lee (2012), Language, thought, and reality : selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, John B. Carroll, Stephen C. Levinson, Penny Lee (2nd ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-51775-1, OCLC 801407269
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Further reading

  • Alford, Dan Moonhawk, The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax
  • Boroditsky, Lera, "How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think?", Edge
  • Boroditsky, Lera; Schmidt, Lauren; Phillips, Webb, "Sex, syntax, and semantics" (PDF), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, pp. 61–79
  • Boroditsky, Lera; Segel, Edward (2011). "Grammar in Art". Frontiers in Psychology. 1: 244. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00244. PMC 3153848. PMID 21833297.
  • Deutscher, Guy (26 August 2010), "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?", The New York Times Magazine
  • Deutscher, Guy (2011), Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, Arrow Books, ISBN 978-0-09-950557-0
  • Everett, Dan (2005), "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language" (PDF), Current Anthropology, 46 (4): 621, doi:10.1086/431525, hdl:2066/41103, S2CID 2223235
  • Kay, Paul; Kempton, Willet (1984), "What is the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis?", American Anthropologist, 86 (1): 65–79, doi:10.1525/aa.1984.86.1.02a00050, S2CID 15144601
  • Kay, Paul; Chad K., McDaniel (1978), "The Linguistic Significance of Meanings of Basic Color Terms", Language, 54 (3): 610–646, doi:10.2307/412789, JSTOR 412789
  • McWhorter, John H. (2016). The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0190468897.
  • O'Neill, Sean (2008), Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California, University of Oklahoma Press, ISBN 978-0-8061-3922-7
  • Swoyer, Chris (2015), "The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive
  • "Which comes first, language or thought?", Harvard Gazette, 22 July 2004

February 03, 2023
linguistic, relativity, hypothesis, linguistic, relativity, also, known, sapir, whorf, hypothesis, ɪər, ɔːr, whorf, hypothesis, whorfianism, principle, suggesting, that, structure, language, influences, speakers, worldview, cognition, thus, people, perceptions. The hypothesis of linguistic relativity also known as the Sapir Whorf hypothesis s e ˌ p ɪer ˈ w ɔːr f the Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers worldview or cognition and thus people s perceptions are relative to their spoken language 1 Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity 2 and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists 3 Many different often contradictory variations of the hypothesis have existed throughout its history 4 The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity now referred to as linguistic determinism says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories This hypothesis was held by some of the early linguists before World War II 3 This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists 2 Although common the term Sapir Whorf hypothesis is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co authored any works and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms 5 6 The principle of linguistic relativity and the relationship between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology and anthropology and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages Contents 1 History 1 1 Ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment 1 2 German Romantic philosophers 1 3 Boas and Sapir 1 4 Independent developments in Europe 1 5 Benjamin Lee Whorf 1 6 Brown and Lenneberg 1 7 Joshua Fishman s Whorfianism of the third kind 1 8 Leiden School 1 9 Rethinking Linguistic Relativity 2 Colour terminology 3 Universalism 4 Cognitive linguistics 4 1 Parameters 5 Refinements 5 1 Behavior centered research 5 2 Psycholinguistic research 6 Other domains 6 1 Science and philosophy 6 2 Therapy and self development 6 3 Artificial languages 6 4 Programming languages 6 5 Science fiction 6 6 Sociolinguistics and linguistic relativity 7 See also 8 Citations 9 Sources 10 Further readingHistory EditThe idea was first clearly expressed by 19th century thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation Members of the early 20th century school of American anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also embraced forms of the idea to a certain extent including in a 1928 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America 7 but Sapir in particular wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism Sapir s student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior Harry Hoijer another of Sapir s students introduced the term Sapir Whorf hypothesis 8 even though the two scholars never formally advanced any such hypothesis 9 A strong version of relativist theory was developed from the late 1920s by the German linguist Leo Weisgerber Whorf s principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg who conducted experiments designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently As the study of the universal nature of human language and cognition came into focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of favor among linguists From the late 1980s a new school of linguistic relativity scholars has examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition finding broad support for non deterministic versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts 10 11 Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains although they are generally weak Currently a balanced view of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non trivial ways but that other processes are better seen as arising from connectionist factors Research is focused on exploring the ways and extent to which language influences thought 10 Ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment Edit The idea that language and thought are intertwined is ancient In his dialogue Cratylus Plato explores the idea that conceptions of reality such as Heraclitean flux are embedded in language But Plato has been read as arguing against sophist thinkers such as Gorgias of Leontini who held that the physical world cannot be experienced except through language this made the question of truth dependent on aesthetic preferences or functional consequences Plato may have held instead that the world consisted of eternal ideas and that language should reflect these ideas as accurately as possible 12 Nevertheless Plato s Seventh Letter claims that ultimate truth is inexpressible in words Following Plato St Augustine for example held the view that language was merely labels applied to already existing concepts This view remained prevalent throughout the Middle Ages 13 Roger Bacon held the opinion that language was but a veil covering up eternal truths hiding them from human experience For Immanuel Kant language was but one of several tools used by humans to experience the world German Romantic philosophers Edit In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the idea of the existence of different national characters or Volksgeister of different ethnic groups was the moving force behind the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism 14 Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg inspired several of the German Romantics As early as 1749 he alludes to something along the lines of linguistic relativity in commenting on a passage in the table of nations in the book of Genesis Everyone according to his language according to their families as to their nations Genesis 10 5 This signifies that these were according to the genius of each according to their language according to the opinion of each Language in its inner meaning signifies opinion thus principles and persuasions This is because there is a correspondence of the language with the intellectual part of man or with his thought like that of an effect with its cause 15 In 1771 he spelled this out more explicitly There is a common genius prevailing among those who are subject to one king and who consequently are under one constitutional law Germany is divided into more governments than the neighboring kingdoms However a common genius prevails everywhere among people speaking the same language 16 Wilhelm von Humboldt Johann Georg Hamann is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to speak of the concept of the genius of a language 17 18 In his Essay Concerning an Academic Question Hamann suggests that a people s language affects their worldview The lineaments of their language will thus correspond to the direction of their mentality 19 In 1820 Wilhelm von Humboldt connected the study of language to the national romanticist program by proposing the view that language is the fabric of thought Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker s native language 20 This view was part of a larger picture in which the world view of an ethnic nation their Weltanschauung was seen as being faithfully reflected in the grammar of their language Von Humboldt argued that languages with an inflectional morphological type such as German English and the other Indo European languages were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the dominance of their speakers over the speakers of less perfect languages Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820 The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world 20 In Humboldt s humanistic understanding of linguistics each language creates the individual s worldview in its particular way through its lexical and grammatical categories conceptual organization and syntactic models 21 Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human rational or a divine origin 22 Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied to various languages to expand on the hypothesis Boas and Sapir Edit Franz Boas Edward Sapir The idea that some languages are superior to others and that lesser languages maintained their speakers in intellectual poverty was widespread in the early 20th century 23 American linguist William Dwight Whitney for example actively strove to eradicate Native American languages arguing that their speakers were savages and would be better off learning English and adopting a civilized way of life 24 The first anthropologist and linguist to challenge this view was Franz Boas 25 While undertaking geographical research in northern Canada he became fascinated with the Inuit and decided to become an ethnographer Boas stressed the equal worth of all cultures and languages that there was no such thing as a primitive language and that all languages were capable of expressing the same content albeit by widely differing means 26 Boas saw language as an inseparable part of culture and he was among the first to require of ethnographers to learn the native language of the culture under study and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends in the original language 27 28 Boas It does not seem likely that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language 29 Boas student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that languages contained the key to understanding the world views of peoples 30 He espoused the viewpoint that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross translation Sapir also thought because language represented reality differently it followed that the speakers of different languages would perceive reality differently Sapir No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds not merely the same world with different labels attached 31 On the other hand Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating It would be naive to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language 32 Sapir was explicit that the connections between language and culture were neither thoroughgoing nor particularly deep if they existed at all It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated Totally unrelated languages share in one culture closely related languages even a single language belong to distinct culture spheres There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified as structurally specialized a group as any that I know of The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves 33 Sapir offered similar observations about speakers of so called world or modern languages noting possession of a common language is still and will continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual understanding between England and America but it is very clear that other factors some of them rapidly cumulative are working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence A common language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the geographical physical and economics determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout the area 34 While Sapir never made a point of studying directly how languages affected thought some notion of probably weak linguistic relativity underlay his basic understanding of language and would be taken up by Whorf 35 Independent developments in Europe Edit Drawing on influences such as Humboldt and Friedrich Nietzsche some European thinkers developed ideas similar to those of Sapir and Whorf generally working in isolation from each other Prominent in Germany from the late 1920s through into the 1960s were the strongly relativist theories of Leo Weisgerber and his key concept of a linguistic inter world mediating between external reality and the forms of a given language in ways peculiar to that language 36 Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky read Sapir s work and experimentally studied the ways in which the development of concepts in children was influenced by structures given in language His 1934 work Thought and Language 37 has been compared to Whorf s and taken as mutually supportive evidence of language s influence on cognition 38 Drawing on Nietzsche s ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics that has been compared to Whorf s notions of linguistic relativity 39 Though influential in their own right this work has not been influential in the debate on linguistic relativity which has tended to center on the American paradigm exemplified by Sapir and Whorf Benjamin Lee Whorf Edit Main article Benjamin Lee Whorf More than any linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he called the linguistic relativity principle 40 Studying Native American languages he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language use differences affected perception Whorf s opinions regarding the nature of the relation between language and thought remain under contention However a version of theory holds some merit for example different words mean different things in different languages not every word in every language has a one to one exact translation in a different language 41 Critics such as Lenneberg 42 Black and Pinker 43 attribute to Whorf a strong linguistic determinism while Lucy Silverstein and Levinson point to Whorf s explicit rejections of determinism and where he contends that translation and commensuration are possible Detractors such as Lenneberg 42 Chomsky and Pinker 44 criticized him for insufficient clarity in his description of how language influences thought and for not proving his conjectures Most of his arguments were in the form of anecdotes and speculations that served as attempts to show how exotic grammatical traits were connected to what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought In Whorf s words We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face on the contrary the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds We cut nature up organize it into concepts and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar or can in some way be calibrated 45 Whorf s illustration of the difference between the English and Shawnee gestalt construction of cleaning a gun with a ramrod From the article Science and Linguistics originally published in the MIT Technology Review 1940 Among Whorf s best known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages Whorf used the acronym SAE Standard Average European to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of less studied languages One of Whorf s examples was the supposedly large number of words for snow in the Inuit language an example which later was contested as a misrepresentation 46 Another is the Hopi language s words for water one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water 47 These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages even of seemingly basic concepts such as snow or water is not always possible 48 Another example is from Whorf s experience as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector 46 While inspecting a chemical plant he observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels no one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels although this was potentially much more dangerous because of the highly flammable vapors still in the barrels He concluded that the use of the word empty in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regard them as harmless although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion This example was later criticized by Lenneberg 42 as not actually demonstrating causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking but instead was an example of circular reasoning Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example claiming that this was a failing of human insight rather than language 44 Whorf s most elaborate argument for linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi 49 He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct countable instances like three days or five years but rather as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them He proposed that this view of time was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns Ekkehart Malotki later claimed that he had found no evidence of Whorf s claims in 1980 s era speakers nor in historical documents dating back to the arrival of Europeans Malotki used evidence from archaeological data calendars historical documents and modern speech he concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time in the way Whorf suggested Universalist scholars such as Pinker often see Malotki s study as a final refutation of Whorf s claim about Hopi whereas relativist scholars such as Lucy and Penny Lee criticized Malotki s study for mischaracterizing Whorf s claims and for forcing Hopi grammar into a model of analysis that doesn t fit the data 50 Whorf s argument about Hopi speakers conceptualization about time is an example of the structure centered approach to research into linguistic relativity which Lucy identified as one of three main strands of research in the field 51 The structure centered approach starts with a language s structural peculiarity and examines its possible ramifications for thought and behavior The defining example is Whorf s observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English More recent research in this vein is Lucy s research describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by English speakers 52 However philosophers including Donald Davidson and Jason Josephson Storm have argued that Whorf s Hopi examples are self refuting as Whorf had to translate Hopi terms into English in order to explain how they are untranslatable 53 Whorf died in 1941 at age 44 leaving multiple unpublished papers His line of thought was continued by linguists and anthropologists such as Hoijer and Lee who both continued investigations into the effect of language on habitual thought and Trager who prepared a number of Whorf s papers for posthumous publishing The most important event for the dissemination of Whorf s ideas to a larger public was the publication in 1956 of his major writings on the topic of linguistic relativity in a single volume titled Language Thought and Reality Brown and Lenneberg Edit In 1953 Eric Lenneberg criticized Whorf s examples from an objectivist view of language holding that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world and that even though languages express these ideas in various ways the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are equivalent He argued that Whorf s English descriptions of a Hopi speaker s view of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English therefore disproving linguistic relativity However Whorf was concerned with how the habitual use of language influences habitual behavior rather than translatability Whorf s point was that while English speakers may be able to understand how a Hopi speaker thinks they do not think in that way 54 Lenneberg s main criticism of Whorf s works was that he never showed the connection between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental phenomenon With Brown Lenneberg proposed that proving such a connection required directly matching linguistic phenomena with behavior They assessed linguistic relativity experimentally and published their findings in 1954 Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated a formal hypothesis Brown and Lenneberg formulated their own Their two tenets were i the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities and ii language causes a particular cognitive structure 55 Brown later developed them into the so called weak and strong formulation Structural differences between language systems will in general be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences of an unspecified sort in the native speakers of the language The structure of anyone s native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language 56 Brown s formulations became widely known and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation verging on linguistic determinism was never advanced by either of them Joshua Fishman s Whorfianism of the third kind Edit Joshua Fishman argued that Whorf s true position was largely overlooked In 1978 he suggested that Whorf was a neo Herderian champion 57 and in 1982 he proposed Whorfianism of the third kind in an attempt to refocus linguists attention on what he claimed was Whorf s real interest namely the intrinsic value of little peoples and little languages 58 Whorf had criticized Ogden s Basic English thus But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English is to lose a power of thought which once lost can never be regained It is the plainest English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness 59 Where Brown s weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language influences thought and the strong version that language determines thought Fishman s Whorfianism of the third kind proposes that language is a key to culture Leiden School Edit The Leiden School is a linguistic theory that models languages as parasites Notable proponent Frederik Kortlandt in a 1985 paper outlining Leiden School theory advocates for a form of linguistic relativity The observation that in all Yuman languages the word for work is a loan from Spanish should be a major blow to any current economic theory In the following paragraph he directly quotes from Sapir Even in the most primitive cultures the strategic word is likely to be more powerful than the direct blow 60 Rethinking Linguistic Relativity Edit The publication of the 1996 anthology Rethinking Linguistic Relativity edited by Gumperz and Levinson began a new period of linguistic relativity studies that focused on cognitive and social aspects The book included studies on linguistic relativity and universalist traditions Levinson documented significant linguistic relativity effects in the different linguistic conceptualization of spatial categories in different languages For example men speaking the Guugu Yimithirr language in Queensland gave accurate navigation instructions using a compass like system of north south east and west along with a hand gesture pointing to the starting direction 61 Lucy defines this approach as domain centered because researchers select a semantic domain and compare it across linguistic and cultural groups 51 Space is another semantic domain that has proven fruitful for linguistic relativity studies 62 Spatial categories vary greatly across languages Speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many ordinary tasks Levinson and others reported three basic spatial categorizations While many languages use combinations of them some languages exhibit only one type and related behaviors For example Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions Speakers define a location as north of the house while an English speaker may use relative positions saying in front of the house or to the left of the house 63 Separate studies by Bowerman and Slobin analyzed the role of language in cognitive processes Bowerman showed that certain cognitive processes did not use language to any significant extent and therefore could not be subject to linguistic relativity clarification needed 64 Slobin described another kind of cognitive process that he named thinking for speaking the kind of process in which perceptional data and other kinds of prelinguistic cognition are translated into linguistic terms for communication clarification needed These Slobin argues are the kinds of cognitive process that are at the root of linguistic relativity 65 Colour terminology EditMain article Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate Since Brown and Lenneberg believed that the objective reality denoted by language was the same for speakers of all languages they decided to test how different languages codified the same message differently and whether differences in codification could be proven to affect behavior Brown and Lenneberg designed experiments involving the codification of colors In their first experiment they investigated whether it was easier for speakers of English to remember color shades for which they had a specific name than to remember colors that were not as easily definable by words This allowed them to compare the linguistic categorization directly to a non linguistic task In a later experiment speakers of two languages that categorize colors differently English and Zuni were asked to recognize colors In this way it could be determined whether the differing color categories of the two speakers would determine their ability to recognize nuances within color categories Brown and Lenneberg found that Zuni speakers who classify green and blue together as a single color did have trouble recognizing and remembering nuances within the green blue category 66 This approach which Lucy later classified as domain centered 51 is acknowledged to be sub optimal because color perception unlike other semantic domains is hardwired into the neural system and as such is subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains In a similar study done by German ophthalmologist Hugo Magnus he circulated a questionnaire to missionaries and traders with ten standardized color samples and instructions for using them in the 1870s These instructions contained an explicit warning that failure of a language to distinguish lexically between two colors did not necessarily imply that speakers of that language did not distinguish the two colors perceptually Magnus received completed questionnaires on twenty five African fifteen Asian three Australian and two European languages He concluded in part As regards the range of the color sense of the primitive peoples tested with our questionnaire it appears in general to remain within the same bounds as the color sense of the civilized nations At least we could not establish a complete lack of the perception of the so called main colors as a special racial characteristic of any one of the tribes investigated for us We consider red yellow green and blue as the main representatives of the colors of long and short wavelength among the tribes we tested not a one lacks the knowledge of any of these four colors Magnus 1880 p 6 as trans in Berlin and Kay 1969 p 141 Magnus did find widespread lexical neutralization of green and blue that is a single word covering both these colors as have all subsequent comparative studies of color lexicons 67 Brown and Lenneberg s study began a tradition of investigation of linguistic relativity through color terminology The studies showed a correlation between color term numbers and ease of recall in both Zuni and English speakers Researchers attributed this to focal colors having higher codability than less focal colors and not with linguistic relativity effects Berlin Kay found universal typological color principles that are determined by biological rather than linguistic factors 68 This study sparked studies into typological universals of color terminology Researchers such as Lucy 51 Saunders 69 and Levinson 70 argued that Berlin and Kay s study does not refute linguistic relativity in color naming because of unsupported assumptions in their study such as whether all cultures in fact have a clearly defined category of color and because of related data problems Researchers such as Maclaury continued investigation into color naming Like Berlin and Kay Maclaury concluded that the domain is governed mostly by physical biological universals 71 72 Studies by Berlin and Kay continued Lenneberg s color research They studied color terminology formation and showed clear universal trends in color naming For example they found that even though languages have different color terminologies they generally recognize certain hues as more focal than others They showed that in languages with few color terms it is predictable from the number of terms which hues are chosen as focal colors for example languages with only three color terms always have the focal colors black white and red 68 The fact that what had been believed to be random differences between color naming in different languages could be shown to follow universal patterns was seen as a powerful argument against linguistic relativity 73 Berlin and Kay s research has since been criticized by relativists such as Lucy who argued that Berlin and Kay s conclusions were skewed by their insistence that color terms encode only color information 74 This Lucy argues made them blind to the instances in which color terms provided other information that might be considered examples of linguistic relativity Universalism EditUniversalist scholars ushered in a period of dissent from ideas about linguistic relativity Lenneberg was one of the first cognitive scientists to begin development of the Universalist theory of language that was formulated by Chomsky as universal grammar effectively arguing that all languages share the same underlying structure The Chomskyan school also holds the belief that linguistic structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific languages are surface phenomena that do not affect the brain s universal cognitive processes This theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s while linguistic relativity became the object of ridicule 75 Other universalist researchers dedicated themselves to dispelling other aspects of linguistic relativity often attacking Whorf s specific points and examples For example Malotki s monumental study of time expressions in Hopi presented many examples that challenged Whorf s timeless interpretation of Hopi language and culture 76 but seemingly failed to address linguistic relativist argument actually posed by Whorf i e that the understanding of time by native Hopi speakers differed from that of speakers of European languages due to the differences in the organization and construction of their respective languages Whorf never claimed that Hopi speakers lacked any concept of time 77 Malotki himself acknowledges that the conceptualizations are different but because he ignores Whorf s use of scare quotes around the word time and the qualifier what we call takes Whorf to be arguing that the Hopi have no concept of time at all 78 79 80 Today many followers of the universalist school of thought still oppose linguistic relativity For example Pinker argues in The Language Instinct that thought is independent of language that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought and that human beings do not even think in natural language i e any language that we actually communicate in rather we think in a meta language preceding any natural language called mentalese Pinker attacks what he calls Whorf s radical position declaring the more you examine Whorf s arguments the less sense they make 44 Pinker and other universalists have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf s views and arguing against strawmen 81 74 54 Cognitive linguistics EditIn the late 1980s and early 1990s advances in cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis 82 One of those who adopted a more Whorfian approach was George Lakoff He argued that language is often used metaphorically and that languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think For example English employs conceptual metaphors likening time with money so that time can be saved and spent and invested whereas other languages do not talk about time in that way Other such metaphors are common to many languages because they are based on general human experience for example metaphors associating up with good and bad with down Lakoff also argued that metaphor plays an important part in political debates such as the right to life or the right to choose or illegal aliens or undocumented workers 83 Parameters Edit In his book Women Fire and Dangerous Things What Categories Reveal About the Mind 54 Lakoff reappraised linguistic relativity and especially Whorf s views about how linguistic categorization reflects and or influences mental categories He concluded that the debate had been confused He described four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions about what constitutes linguistic relativity The degree and depth of linguistic relativity Perhaps a few examples of superficial differences in language and associated behavior are enough to demonstrate the existence of linguistic relativity Alternatively perhaps only deep differences that permeate the linguistic and cultural system suffice Whether conceptual systems are absolute or whether they can evolve Whether the similarity criterion is translatability or the use of linguistic expressions Whether the focus of linguistic relativity is in language or in the brainLakoff concluded that many of Whorf s critics had criticized him using novel definitions of linguistic relativity rendering their criticisms moot Refinements EditResearchers such as Boroditsky Choi Majid Lucy and Levinson believe that language influences thought in more limited ways than the broadest early claims Researchers examine the interface between thought or cognition language and culture and describe the relevant influences They use experimental data to back up their conclusions 84 85 Kay ultimately concluded that the Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left 86 His findings show that accounting for brain lateralization offers another perspective Behavior centered research Edit Recent studies have also taken the behavior centered approach which starts by comparing behavior across linguistic groups and then searches for causes for that behavior in the linguistic system 51 In an early example of this approach Whorf attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers use of the word empty to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors More recently Bloom noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counterfactual questions posed to them in a questionnaire He concluded that this was related to the way in which counter factuality is marked grammatically in Chinese Other researchers attributed this result to Bloom s flawed translations 87 Stromnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process while Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker 88 Everett s work on the Piraha language of the Brazilian Amazon 89 found several peculiarities that he interpreted as corresponding to linguistically rare features such as a lack of numbers and color terms in the way those are otherwise defined and the absence of certain types of clauses Everett s conclusions were met with skepticism from universalists 90 who claimed that the linguistic deficit is explained by the lack of need for such concepts 91 Recent research with non linguistic experiments in languages with different grammatical properties e g languages with and without numeral classifiers or with different gender grammar systems showed that language differences in human categorization are due to such differences 92 Experimental research suggests that this linguistic influence on thought diminishes over time as when speakers of one language are exposed to another 93 A study published by the American Psychological Association s Journal of Experimental Psychology claimed that language can influence how one estimates time The study focused on three groups those who spoke only Swedish those who spoke only Spanish and bilingual speakers who spoke both of those languages Swedish speakers describe time using distance terms like long or short while Spanish speakers do it using quantity related terms like a lot or little The researchers asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed while watching a line growing across a screen or a container being filled or both The researchers stated that When reproducing duration Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size quantity When the bilinguals were prompted with the word duracion the Spanish word for duration they based their time estimates of how full the containers were ignoring the growing lines When prompted with the word tid the Swedish word for duration they estimated the time elapsed solely by the distance the lines had traveled 94 95 Kashima amp Kashima showed that people living in countries where spoken languages often drop pronouns such as Japanese tend to have more collectivistic values than those who use non pronoun drop languages such as English They argued that the explicit reference to you and I reminds speakers the distinction between the self and other 96 A 2013 study found that those who speak futureless languages with no grammatical marking of the future tense save more retire with more wealth smoke less practice safer sex and are less obese than those who do not 97 This effect has come to be called the linguistic savings hypothesis and has been replicated in several cross cultural and cross country studies However a study of Chinese which can be spoken both with and without the grammatical future marking will found that subjects do not behave more impatiently when will is used repetitively This laboratory based finding of elective variation within a single language does not refute the linguistic savings hypothesis but some have suggested that it shows the effect may be due to culture or other non linguistic factors 98 Psycholinguistic research Edit Psycholinguistic studies explored motion perception emotion perception object representation and memory 99 100 101 102 The gold standard of psycholinguistic studies on linguistic relativity is now finding non linguistic cognitive differences example needed in speakers of different languages thus rendering inapplicable Pinker s criticism that linguistic relativity is circular Recent work with bilingual speakers attempts to distinguish the effects of language from those of culture on bilingual cognition including perceptions of time space motion colors and emotion 103 Researchers described differences example needed between bilinguals and monolinguals in perception of color 104 representations of time 105 and other elements of cognition One experiment found that speakers of languages without numbers greater than two had difficulty counting the number of taps for example making more errors distinguishing between six and seven taps 106 Presumably this is because they could not track the taps using numbers repeated in the phonological loop Other domains EditLinguistic relativity inspired others to consider whether thought and emotion could be influenced by manipulating language Science and philosophy Edit The question bears on philosophical psychological linguistic and anthropological questions clarification needed A major question is whether human psychological faculties are mostly innate or whether they are mostly a result of learning and hence subject to cultural and social processes such as language The innate view holds that humans share the same set of basic faculties and that variability due to cultural differences is less important and that the human mind is a mostly biological construction so that all humans sharing the same neurological configuration can be expected to have similar cognitive patterns Multiple alternatives have advocates The contrary constructivist position holds that human faculties and concepts are largely influenced by socially constructed and learned categories without many biological restrictions Another variant is idealist which holds that human mental capacities are generally unrestricted by biological material structures Another is essentialist which holds that essential differences clarification needed may influence the ways individuals or groups experience and conceptualize the world Yet another is relativist cultural relativism which sees different cultural groups as employing different conceptual schemes that are not necessarily compatible or commensurable nor more or less in accord with external reality 107 Another debate considers whether thought is a form of internal speech or is independent of and prior to language 108 In the philosophy of language the question addresses the relations between language knowledge and the external world and the concept of truth Philosophers such as Putnam Fodor Davidson and Dennett see language as representing directly entities from the objective world and that categorization reflect that world Other philosophers e g Quine Searle and Foucault argue that categorization and conceptualization is subjective and arbitrary Another view represented by Storm seeks a third way by emphasizing how language changes and imperfectly represents reality without being completely divorced from ontology 109 Another question is whether language is a tool for representing and referring to objects in the world or whether it is a system used to construct mental representations that can be communicated clarification needed Therapy and self development Edit Main articles General semantics and neuro linguistic programming Sapir Whorf contemporary Alfred Korzybski was independently developing his theory of general semantics which was aimed at using language s influence on thinking to maximize human cognitive abilities Korzybski s thinking was influenced by logical philosophy such as Russell and Whitehead s Principia Mathematica and Wittgenstein s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus 110 Although Korzybski was not aware of Sapir and Whorf s writings the movement was followed by Whorf admirer Stuart Chase who fused Whorf s interest in cultural linguistic variation with Korzybski s programme in his popular work The Tyranny of Words S I Hayakawa was a follower and popularizer of Korzybski s work writing Language in Thought and Action The general semantics movement influenced the development of neuro linguistic programming NLP another therapeutic technique that seeks to use awareness of language use to influence cognitive patterns 111 Korzybski independently described a strong version of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity 112 We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s emantic r eactions and that the structure which a language exhibits and impresses upon us unconsciously is automatically projected upon the world around us Korzybski 1930 113 Artificial languages Edit Main articles Constructed languages and Experimental languages In their fiction authors such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell explored how linguistic relativity might be exploited for political purposes In Rand s Anthem a fictive communist society removed the possibility of individualism by removing the word I from the language 114 In Orwell s 1984 the authoritarian state created the language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think critically about the government or even to contemplate that they might be impoverished or oppressed by reducing the number of words to reduce the thought of the locutor 115 Others have been fascinated by the possibilities of creating new languages that could enable new and perhaps better ways of thinking Examples of such languages designed to explore the human mind include Loglan explicitly designed by James Cooke Brown to test the linguistic relativity hypothesis by experimenting whether it would make its speakers think more logically Speakers of Lojban an evolution of Loglan report that they feel speaking the language enhances their ability for logical thinking citation needed Suzette Haden Elgin who was involved in the early development of neuro linguistic programming invented the language Laadan to explore linguistic relativity by making it easier to express what Elgin considered the female worldview as opposed to Standard Average European languages which she considered to convey a male centered world view 116 John Quijada s language Ithkuil was designed to explore the limits of the number of cognitive categories a language can keep its speakers aware of at once 117 Similarly Sonja Lang s Toki Pona was developed according to a Taoist point of view for exploring how or if such a language would direct human thought 118 Programming languages Edit APL programming language originator Kenneth E Iverson believed that the Sapir Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages without actually mentioning it by name His Turing Award lecture Notation as a Tool of Thought was devoted to this theme arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms non primary source needed 119 The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes such as a conceptual hierarchy of computer languages with more expressive and succinct languages at the top Thus the so called blub paradox after a hypothetical programming language of average complexity called Blub says that anyone preferentially using some particular programming language will know that it is more powerful than some but not that it is less powerful than others The reason is that writing in some language means thinking in that language Hence the paradox because typically programmers are satisfied with whatever language they happen to use because it dictates the way they think about programs 120 In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention Yukihiro Matsumoto creator of the programming language Ruby said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel 17 based on the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis 121 Science fiction Edit Numerous examples of linguistic relativity have appeared in science fiction The totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty Four in effect acts on the basis of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis seeking to replace English with Newspeak a language constructed specifically with the intention that thoughts subversive of the regime cannot be expressed in it and therefore people educated to speak and think in it would not have such thoughts In his 1958 science fiction novel The Languages of Pao the author Jack Vance describes how specialized languages are a major part of a strategy to create specific classes in a society to enable the population to withstand occupation and develop itself In Samuel R Delany s 1966 science fiction novel Babel 17 the author describes a highly advanced information dense language that can be used as a weapon Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought 122 Ted Chiang s 1998 short story Story of Your Life developed the concept of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis as applied to an alien species which visits Earth The aliens biology contributes to their spoken and written languages which are distinct In the 2016 American film Arrival based on Chiang s short story the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is the premise The protagonist explains that the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is the theory that the language you speak determines how you think 123 Gene Wolfe s four volume science fiction novel The Book of the New Sun describes the North American Ascian people as speaking a language composed entirely of quotations that have been approved by a small ruling class Sociolinguistics and linguistic relativity Edit The way in which sociolinguistics 124 plays a role in variables within language like the way words are pronounced word selection in certain dialogue context and tone suggests it may have implications for linguistic relativity See also Edit Philosophy portal Linguistics portalBasic Color Terms Their Universality and Evolution Bicameral mentality hypothesis in psychology Eskimo words for snow linguistic cliche Ethnolinguistics academic discipline Hopi time controversy academic debate about conceptualization of time in Hopi language Hypocognition inability to communicate due to no words for a concept Labeling theory labeling people changes their behavior Language and thought the study of how language influences thought Language planning deliberate effort to influence languages or their varieties within a speech community Linguistic anthropology interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life Linguistic determinism idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought Logocracy form of government by use of words Psycholinguistics study of relations between psychology and language Relativism philosophical view rejecting universalism e g about truth Terministic screen term in the theory and criticism of rhetoricCitations Edit Ottenheimer Harriet 2009 The anthropology of language an introduction to linguistic anthropology 2nd ed Belmont CA Wadsworth pp 33 34 ISBN 978 0 495 50884 7 OCLC 216940204 a b Ahearn Laura M 2012 Living language an introduction to linguistic anthropology Chichester West Sussex U K p 69 ISBN 978 1 4443 4056 3 OCLC 729731177 a b Boroditsky Lera Liberman Mark 13 23 December 2010 For and Against Linguistic Relativity The Economist The Economist Newspaper Limited Archived from the original on 15 February 2012 Retrieved 19 September 2019 a debate between university professors Leavitt 2010 p 3 Hill amp Mannheim 1992 Kennison Shelia 2013 Introduction to language development 1 ed Los Angeles Sage ISBN 978 1412996068 page needed Koerner 1992 p 180 The Sapir Whorf hypothesis in Hoijer 1954 pp 92 105 This usage is now generally seen as a misnomer As Jane Hill and Bruce Mannheim write Yet just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis is neither consistent with the writings of Sapir and Whorf nor a hypothesis Hill amp Mannheim 1992 p 386 a b Koerner E F K Towards a full pedigree of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis from Locke to Lucy chapter in Putz amp Verspoor 2000 p 17 Wolff amp Holmes 2011 McComiskey Bruce 2002 Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric SIU Press ISBN 978 0 8093 2397 5 Gumperz amp Levinson 1996 p 2 Leavitt 2010 p 75 Arcana Coelestia section 1059 http smallcanonsearch com read php book ac amp section 1059 True Christian Religion section 813 http smallcanonsearch com read php book tcr amp section 813 Robert L Miller The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian Ethnolinguistics p 18 McAfee 2004 Quoted in Bernard D Den Ouden Language and Creativity An Interdisciplinary Essay in Chomskyan Humanism p 25 a b Trabant Jurgen How relativistic are Humboldts Weltansichten in Putz amp Verspoor 2000 Kahane Henry Kahane Renee 1983 Humanistic linguistics The Journal of Aesthetic Education 17 4 65 89 doi 10 2307 3332265 JSTOR 3332265 Beek Wouter Linguistic Relativism Variants and Misconceptions PDF Universiteit van Amsterdam Archived PDF from the original on 26 January 2021 Retrieved 18 November 2022 Linguistic relativism is a relatively new concept it did not exist in the Enlightenment It was posed for the first time as will be treated below in the Romantic era by Hamann and Herder and later by Humboldt Migge amp Leglise 2007 Seuren 1998 p 180 Seuren 1998 p 181 Dall Wm H Boas Franz 1887 Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification Science 9 228 587 589 Bibcode 1887Sci 9 587D doi 10 1126 science ns 9 228 587 ISSN 0036 8075 JSTOR 1762958 PMID 17779724 S2CID 46250503 Ottenheimer Harriet 2009 The anthropology of language an introduction to linguistic anthropology 2nd ed Belmont CA Wadsworth p 8 ISBN 978 0 495 50884 7 OCLC 216940204 Boas Franz 1911 Introduction Handbook of American Indian Languages vol 1 p 1 83 Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40 Washington Government Print Office Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology p 73 Boas Franz 1911 Handbook of American Indian languages Vol 1 Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40 Washington Government Print Office Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Leavitt 2010 p 133 Sapir Edward 1929 The status of linguistics as a science Language 5 4 207 214 doi 10 2307 409588 hdl 11858 00 001M 0000 002C 4321 4 JSTOR 409588 Sapir Edward Swadesh Morris 1946 American Indian Grammatical Categories pp 100 107 Sapir 1921 p 213 4 Sapir 1921 p 215 Leavitt 2010 p 135 For a critique of Weisgerber see for example Beat Lehmann 1998 ROT ist nicht rot ist nicht rot Eine Bilanz und Neuinterpretation der linguistischen Relativitatstheorie Gunter Narr Tubingen pp 58 80 Iwar Werlen 2002 Das Worten der Welt in Lexikologie Ein internationales Handbuch ed by D Alan Cruse et al Walter de Gruyter Berlin amp New York 1 pp 380 391 Vygotsky L 1934 1986 Thought and language Cambridge Massachusetts MIT Press Lucy amp Wertsch 1987 Pula 1992 Whorf 1956 p 214 https courses lumenlearning com atd hostos child development education chapter linguistic relativity a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a Missing or empty title help a b c Lenneberg 1953 Pinker 1994 pp 59 64 a b c Pinker 1994 p 60 Whorf 1956 p 212 214 a b Pullum 1991 Whorf 2012 p 182 Whorf 2012 p 203 Whorf 1956 Lee 1996 Leavitt 2011 pp 179 187 Lucy 1992b p 286 Lucy 1996 p 43 Dinwoodie 2006 a b c d e Lucy J A 1997 The linguistics of color In C L Hardin amp L Maffi eds Color categories in thought and language pp 320 436 Cambridge Cambridge University Press Lucy 1992b Josephson Storm Jason Ananda 2021 Metamodernism the future of theory Chicago p 185 ISBN 978 0 226 78679 7 OCLC 1249473210 a b c Lakoff 1987 Brown amp Lenneberg 1954 p 455 457 Brown 1976 p 128 Fishman 1978 Fishman 1982 p 5 Whorf 1956 p 244 Kortlandt Frederik 1985 A Parasitological View of Non Constructible Sets PDF In Pieper Ursula Stickel Gerhard eds Studia linguistica diachronica et synchronica De Gruyter Mouton doi 10 1515 9783110850604 ISBN 9783110850604 Levinson 1998 p 13 Lucy 1997 p 301 Levinson 1996 Bowerman Melissa 1974 Learning the Structure of Causative Verbs A Study in the Relationship of Cognitive Semantic and Syntactic Development Papers and Reports on Child Language Development no 8 Stanford University California Committee on Linguistics Slobin Dan I 1987 Thinking for Speaking Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society p 435 445 D Andrade 1995 p 185 P Kay in International Encyclopedia of the Social amp Behavioral Sciences 2001 a b Berlin amp Kay 1969 Saunders Barbara 2000 Revisiting Basic Color Terms Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 81 99 doi 10 1111 1467 9655 00005 Levinson Stephen C 2000 Yeli Dnye and the Theory of Basic Color Terms Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10 3 55 doi 10 1525 jlin 2000 10 1 3 hdl 11858 00 001M 0000 0013 2A6B F MacLaury Robert E Hewes Gordon W Kinnear Paul R Deregowski J B Merrifield William R Saunders B a C Stanlaw James Toren Christina Van Brakel J 1 April 1992 From Brightness to Hue An Explanatory Model of Color Category Evolution and Comments and Reply Current Anthropology 33 2 137 186 doi 10 1086 204049 ISSN 0011 3204 S2CID 144088006 MacLaury Robert E 1 January 1997 Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica Constructing Categories as Vantages University of Texas Press ISBN 978 0 292 75193 4 Gumperz amp Levinson 1996 p 6 a b Lucy 1992a Gumperz amp Levinson 1996 p 3 6 Malotki 1983 Lucy 1996 Lucy 1992b p 286 Leavitt 2011 p 180 Levinson 2012 p xii Casasanto 2008 Seidner 1982 Lakoff George 1980 Metaphors we live by Mark Johnson Chicago University of Chicago Press ISBN 0 226 46801 1 OCLC 6042798 Gentner Dedre Boroditsky Lera 2001 Individuation relativity and early word development In Melissa Bowerman and Stephen Levinson ed Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development Cambridge University Press pp 215 256 ISBN 978 0 521 59659 6 Levinson Stephen 2001 Covariation between spatial language and cognition and its implications for language learning In Melissa Bowerman and Stephen Levinson ed Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development Cambridge University Press pp 566 588 ISBN 978 0 521 59659 6 Gilbert Aubrey L Regier Terry Kay Paul Ivry Richard B 10 January 2006 Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 103 2 489 494 Bibcode 2006PNAS 103 489G doi 10 1073 pnas 0509868103 ISSN 0027 8424 PMC 1326182 PMID 16387848 Au T 1984 Counterfactuals In reply to Alfred Bloom 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Bross Fabian Pfaller Philip 2012 The decreasing Whorf effect a study in the classifier systems of Mandarin and Thai PDF Journal of Unsolved Questions 2 2 S19 S24 Pandey Avaneesh 3 May 2017 The Language You Speak Affects How Your Brain Experiences The Passage of Time International Business Times Retrieved 15 December 2019 Pierre Kendra 9 May 2017 The language you speak changes your perception of time Popsci com Retrieved 4 June 2018 Kashima E amp Kashima Y 1998 Culture and language The case of cultural dimensions and personal pronoun use Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology 29 461 486 Chen M Keith 1 April 2013 The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior Evidence from Savings Rates Health Behaviors and Retirement Assets PDF American Economic Review 103 2 690 731 doi 10 1257 aer 103 2 690 PMID 29524925 Chen Josie I He Tai Sen Riyanto Yohanes E November 2019 The effect of language on economic behavior Examining the causal link between future tense and time preference in the lab European 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Phillips amp Boroditsky 2003 Andrews 1994 Boroditsky Ham amp Ramscar 2002 The birth of a language Subtitle Podcast 24 June 2020 Leavitt 2011 Raykowski Wes 2014 Conceptual Understructure of Human Experience Volume 1 Thesis Josephson Storm Jason Ananda 2021 Metamodernism the future of theory Chicago pp 186 7 ISBN 978 0 226 78679 7 OCLC 1249473210 Korzybski Alfred 1949 Time binding The General Theory Two Papers 1924 1926 Institute of General Semantics pp 5 54 Wake Lisa 31 March 2008 Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy A Postmodern Perspective Routledge ISBN 978 1 134 09482 0 Read Allen Walker 1982 The Semiotic Aspect of Alfred Korzybski s General Semantics PDF Semiotics 101 107 doi 10 5840 cpsem19828 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Korzybski Alfred 1958 Science and Sanity An Introduction to Non Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics Institute of GS ISBN 978 0 937298 01 5 Critical Essays The Meaning and Importance of I in Anthem CliffNotes 2021 Retrieved 25 October 2021 Pinker 1994 chap 3 Okrent Arika 2009 In the Land of Invented Languages Esperanto Rock Stars Klingon Poets Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language Spiegel amp Grau pp 208 257 ISBN 978 0 385 52788 0 Foer Joshua 24 December 2012 UTOPIAN FOR BEGINNERS An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented The New York Times A Million Words and Counting How Global English Is Rewriting the World Paul J J Payack C 2007 p 194 Iverson Kenneth E August 1980 Notation as a tool of thought Communications of the ACM 23 8 444 465 doi 10 1145 358896 358899 S2CID 14177211 Graham 2004 The Power and Philosophy of Ruby or how to create Babel 17 Archived from the original on 11 August 2003 The Art of Fiction No 210 The Paris Review Retrieved 7 March 2021 The science behind the movie Arrival The Washington Post Retrieved 23 April 2017 https courses lumenlearning com culturalanthropology chapter models of language and culture a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a Missing or empty title help Sources EditAhearn Laura M 21 March 2011 Living Language An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology John Wiley amp Sons ISBN 978 1 4443 4054 9 Andrews David R 1994 The Russian Color Categories Sinij and Goluboj An Experimental Analysis of Their Interpretation in the Standard and Emigre Languages Journal of Slavic Linguistics 2 1 9 28 JSTOR 24599022 Athanasopoulos Panos 2009 Cognitive representation of colour in bilinguals The case of Greek blues Bilingualism Language and Cognition 12 1 83 95 doi 10 1017 S136672890800388X S2CID 145526128 Berlin Brent Kay Paul 1969 Basic Color Terms Their Universality and Evolution Berkeley University of California Press Boroditsky Lera Ham Wendy Ramscar Michael 2002 What is universal in event perception Comparing English amp Indonesian speakers in W D Gray C D Schunn eds Proceedings of the Twenty Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive 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Fogelson Raymond eds New Perspectives on Native North America Cultures Histories And Representations U of Nebraska Drivonikou G V Kay P Regier T Ivry R B Gilbert A L Franklin A Davies I R L 2007 Further evidence that Whorfian effects are stronger in the right visual field than the left Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104 3 1097 1102 Bibcode 2007PNAS 104 1097D doi 10 1073 pnas 0610132104 PMC 1783370 PMID 17213312 Everett Caleb 2013 Linguistic Relativity Evidence Across Languages and Cognitive Domains Berlin De Gruyter Mouton Fishman Joshua A 1978 Positive bilingualism Some overlooked rationales and forefathers in J E Alatis ed International dimensions of bilingual education Washington D C Georgetown University Press pp 42 52 Fishman Joshua A 1982 Whorfianism of the third kind Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide societal asset Language in Society 11 1 14 doi 10 1017 S0047404500009015 S2CID 146708672 Gilbert A Regier T Kay P Ivry R 2008 Support for lateralization of the Whorf effect beyond the realm of color discrimination PDF Brain and Language 105 2 91 98 doi 10 1016 j bandl 2007 06 001 PMID 17628656 S2CID 9285112 Graham Paul 2004 Beating the Averages Hackers amp Painters Big Ideas from the Computer Age O Reilly Media Inc ISBN 978 0 596 00662 4 Gumperz John Levinson Stephen eds 1996 Rethinking Linguistic Relativity Cambridge Cambridge University Press Hill Jane H Mannheim Bruce 1992 Language and World view Annual Review of Anthropology 21 381 406 doi 10 1146 annurev an 21 100192 002121 Hoijer Harry ed 1954 Language in culture Conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture Chicago University of Chicago Press Koerner E F Konrad 1992 The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis A Preliminary History and a Bibliographical Essay Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2 2 173 198 doi 10 1525 jlin 1992 2 2 173 JSTOR 43102168 Lakoff George 1987 Women fire and dangerous things University of Chicago Press Leavitt John Harold 2010 Linguistic relativities language diversity and modern thought Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 511 99268 1 OCLC 699490918 Leavitt John 2011 Linguistic Relativities Language Diversity and Modern Thought Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 76782 8 Lee Penny 1 January 1996 The Whorf Theory Complex A Critical Reconstruction John Benjamins Publishing ISBN 978 90 272 4569 4 Lenneberg Eric Brown A M 1956 The Language of Experience a Study in Methodology Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics Lenneberg Eric 1953 Cognition in Ethnolinguistics Language 29 4 463 471 doi 10 2307 409956 JSTOR 409956 Levinson Stephen C 1996 Language and Space Annual Review of Anthropology 25 353 82 doi 10 1146 annurev anthro 25 1 353 hdl 11858 00 001M 0000 0013 2B64 6 S2CID 8050166 Levinson Stephen C 1998 Studying Spatial Conceptualization across Cultures Anthropology and Cognitive Science Ethos 26 1 7 24 doi 10 1525 eth 1998 26 1 7 hdl 11858 00 001M 0000 0013 2ABE 6 JSTOR 640692 S2CID 53751699 Levinson Stephen C 2000 Yeli Dnye and the Theory of Basic Color Terms PDF Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10 1 3 55 doi 10 1525 jlin 2000 10 1 3 hdl 11858 00 001M 0000 0013 2A6B F Levinson Stephen C 2012 Foreword in Carroll John B Levinson Stephen C Lee Penny eds Language Thought and Reality 2nd ed Cambridge Massachusetts London UK MIT Press pp vii xxiii ISBN 978 0 262 51775 1 Lucy John A 1992a Grammatical Categories and Cognition A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis Cambridge Cambridge University Press Lucy John A 1992b Language Diversity and Thought A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis Cambridge Cambridge University Press Lucy John A 1997 Linguistic Relativity PDF Annual Review of Anthropology 26 291 312 doi 10 1146 annurev anthro 26 1 291 JSTOR 2952524 Lucy John A 1996 The Scope of Linguistic Relativity An analysis of Empirical Research in Gumperz John Levinson Stephen eds Rethinking Linguistic Relativity Cambridge Cambridge University Press pp 37 69 Lucy J A Wertsch J 1987 Vygotsky and Whorf A comparative analysis in Hickmann M ed Social and functional approaches to language and thought Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press pp 67 86 Malotki Ekkehart 1983 Werner Winter ed Hopi Time A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 20 ISBN 9789027933492 McAfee Christina 2004 The Linguistic Relativity Theory and Benjamin Lee Whorf The McMaster Journal of Communication 1 1 26 31 Migge Bettina Leglise Isabelle 2007 Language and colonialism in Hellinger Marlis Pauwels Anne eds Handbook of Language and Communication Diversity and Change Handbooks of Applied Linguistics De Gruyter Mouton doi 10 1515 9783110198539 2 299 hdl 10197 8009 ISBN 9783110198539 Niemeier Susanne 2000 Rene Dirven ed Evidence for linguistic relativity John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN 978 90 272 3705 7 Pavlenko Aneta 1999 New approaches to concepts in bilingual memory Bilingualism Language and Cognition 2 3 209 230 doi 10 1017 S1366728999000322 S2CID 28571055 Phillips Webb Boroditsky Lera 2003 Can quirks of grammar affect the way you think Grammatical gender and object concepts in R Alterman D Kirsh eds Proceedings of the Twenty Fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Boston Cognitive Science Society Pinker Steven 1994 The Language Instinct How the Mind Creates Language Perennial Pula Robert P 1992 The Nietzsche Korzybski Sapir Whorf Hypothesis ETC A Review of General Semantics 49 1 50 57 Pullum Geoffrey 1991 The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language PDF Chicago University Press Putz Martin Verspoor Marjolyn eds 2000 Explorations in linguistic relativity John Benjamins Publishing Company ISBN 978 90 272 3706 4 Sapir Edward 1921 Language An Introduction to the Study of Speech Harcourt Brace Sapir Edward 1983 David G Mandelbaum ed Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language Culture and Personality University of California Press Schultz Emily Ann 1990 Dialogue at the Margins Whorf Bakhtin and Linguistic Relativity University of Wisconsin Press Seidner Stanley S 1982 Ethnicity Language and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective Bruxelles Centre de recherche sur le pluralinguismePress Seuren Pieter A M 1998 Western linguistics An historical introduction Wiley Blackwell ISBN 978 0 631 20891 4 Trager George L 1959 The Systematization of the Whorf Hypothesis Anthropological Linguistics 1 1 31 35 Whorf Benjamin 1956 Carroll John B ed Language Thought and Reality Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf MIT Press Whorf Benjamin Lee 2012 Language thought and reality selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf John B Carroll Stephen C Levinson Penny Lee 2nd ed Cambridge Mass The MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 51775 1 OCLC 801407269 Wolff K J Holmes 2011 Linguistic relativity PDF Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Cognitive Science pp 253 265 archived from the original PDF on 18 July 2013Further reading EditAlford Dan Moonhawk The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax Boroditsky Lera How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think Edge Boroditsky Lera Schmidt Lauren Phillips Webb Sex syntax and semantics PDF Language in Mind Advances in the Study of Language and Thought pp 61 79 Boroditsky Lera Segel Edward 2011 Grammar in Art Frontiers in Psychology 1 244 doi 10 3389 fpsyg 2010 00244 PMC 3153848 PMID 21833297 Deutscher Guy 26 August 2010 Does Your Language Shape How You Think The New York Times Magazine Deutscher Guy 2011 Through the Language Glass Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Arrow Books ISBN 978 0 09 950557 0 Everett Dan 2005 Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language PDF Current Anthropology 46 4 621 doi 10 1086 431525 hdl 2066 41103 S2CID 2223235 Kay Paul Kempton Willet 1984 What is the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis American Anthropologist 86 1 65 79 doi 10 1525 aa 1984 86 1 02a00050 S2CID 15144601 Kay Paul Chad K McDaniel 1978 The Linguistic Significance of Meanings of Basic Color Terms Language 54 3 610 646 doi 10 2307 412789 JSTOR 412789 McWhorter John H 2016 The Language Hoax Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0190468897 O Neill Sean 2008 Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California University of Oklahoma Press ISBN 978 0 8061 3922 7 Swoyer Chris 2015 The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive Which comes first language or thought Harvard Gazette 22 July 2004 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Linguistic relativity amp oldid 1136281941, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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