Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. This controversial hypothesis is named after the linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.

History

The position that language anchors thought (thinking is shabdanA or 'languageing') was argued for cogently by Bhartrihari (6th c.AD) and was the subject of centuries of debate in the Indian linguistic tradition. Related notions in the West, such as the axiom that language has controlling effects upon thought can be traced to Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium" (On the comparative study of languages), and the notion has been largely assimilated into Western thought. Karl Kerenyi began his 1976 English language translation of Dionysus with this passage:

"The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages are not so much a means of expressing truth that has already been established as means of discovering truth that was previously unknown. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways of looking at the world."

The origin of the SWH as a more rigorous examination of this familiar cultural perception can be traced back to the work of Franz Boas, the founder of anthropology in the United States. Boas was educated in Germany in the late 19th century at a time when scientists such as Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann were attempting to understand the physiology of sensation.

One important philosophical approach at the time was a revival of interest in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant claimed that knowledge was the result of concrete cognitive work on the part of an individual person—reality ("sensuous intuition") was inherently in flux and understanding resulted when someone took that intuition and interpreted it via their "categories of the understanding." Different individuals may thus perceive the same noumenal reality as phenomenal instances of their different, individual concepts.

In the United States, Boas encountered Native American languages from many different linguistic families—all of which were quite different from the Semitic and Indo-European languages which most European scholars studied. Boas came to realize how greatly ways of life and grammatical categories could vary from one place to another. As a result he came to believe that the culture and lifeways of a people were reflected in the language that they spoke.

Sapir was one of Boas's star students. He furthered Boas's argument by noting that languages were systematic, formally complete systems. Thus, it was not this or that particular word that expressed a particular mode of thought or behavior, but that the coherent and systematic nature of language interacted at a wider level with thought and behavior. While his views changed over time, it seems that towards the end of his life Sapir came to believe that language did not merely mirror culture and habitual action, but that language and thought might in fact be in a relationship of mutual influence or perhaps even determination.

Whorf gave this idea greater precision by examining the particular grammatical mechanisms by which thought influenced language. He argued his point thus:

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. 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 kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in 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."

— (Language, Thought and Reality pp. 212–214).

Whorf's formulation of this "principle of linguistic relativity" is often stereotyped as a "prisonhouse" view of language in which one's thinking and behavior is completely and utterly shaped by one's language. While some people might make this "vulgar Whorfian" argument, Whorf himself sought merely to insist that thought and action were linguistically and socially mediated. In doing so he opposed what he called a "natural logic" position which he claimed believed "talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to 'express' what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically" (Language, Thought and Reality p. 207). On this account, he argued, "thought does not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe" (Language, Thought and Reality p. 208).

Whorf's close analysis of the differences between English and (in one famous instance) the Hopi language raised the bar for an analysis of the relationship between language, thought, and reality by relying on close analysis of grammatical structure, rather than a more impressionistic account of the differences between, say, vocabulary items in a language. For example, "Standard Average European" (SAE) – i.e., Western languages in general – tends to analyse reality as objects in space: the present and future are thought of as a "places", and time is a path linking them. A phrase like "three days" is grammatically equivalent to "three apples", or "three kilometres". Other languages, including many Native American languages, are oriented towards process. To monolingual speakers of such languages, the concrete/spatial metaphors of SAE grammar may make little sense. Whorf himself claimed that his work on the SWH was inspired by his insight that a Hopi speaker would find relativistic physics fundamentally easier to grasp than an SAE speaker would.

As a result of his status outside the academy Whorf's work on linguistic relativity, conducted largely in the late 1930s, did not become popular until the posthumous publication of his writings in the 1950s. In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown created the Loglan constructed language (Lojban, a reformed variant of Loglan, still exists as a living language) in order to test the hypothesis. However, no such experiment was ever conducted. Linguistic theories of the 1960s— such as those proposed by Noam Chomsky —focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result Whorf's work fell out of favor. In the late 1980s and early 1990s advances in cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics renewed interest in the SWH. An example of a recent Chomskian approach to this issue is Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct, while a more 'Whorfian' approach might be represented by authors such as George Lakoff, who have argued that political arguments, for instance, are shaped by the web of conceptual metaphors that underlie language use. Today researchers disagree — often intensely— about how strongly language influences thought. However, this disagreement has sparked increasing interest in the issue and a great deal of innovative and important research.

Criticism

A possible argument against the strong ("Weltanschauung") version of this idea, that all thought is constrained by language, can be discovered through personal experience: all people have occasional difficulty expressing themselves due to constraints in the language, and are conscious that the language is not adequate for what they mean. Perhaps they say or write something, and then think "that's not quite what I meant to say" or perhaps they cannot find a good way to explain a concept they understand to a novice. This makes it clear that what is being thought is not a set of words, because one can understand a concept without being able to express it in words.

The opposite extreme—that language does not influence thought at all—is also widely considered to be false. For example, it has been shown that people's discrimination of similar colors can be influenced by how their language organizes color names (however, again — this merely proves that people's abilities to signal a difference in color is bound by language. Although the subject might perceive and sense two different colors, they might not, due to years of practice, indicate that they see a difference.). Another study showed that deaf children of hearing parents may fail on some cognitive tasks unrelated to hearing, while deaf children of deaf parents succeed, due to the hearing parents being less fluent in sign language.

Linguistic determinism

Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit, who have multiple words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Inuit, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have a large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax, he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf. More to the point is the triviality of this observation. The fact that wine fanciers have a rich vocabulary to speak about the tastes they find in wines is not thought of as evidence that their minds work differently, only that they know more than the average person about wine. English-speaking skiers may also have a rich vocabulary for snow.

These ideas have met with some resistance in the linguistic community. Numerous studies in color perception across various cultures have resulted in differing viewpoints. (Berlin & Kay, 1969; Heider, 1972; Heider & Oliver, 1973; Rosch, 1974; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976)

Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in the idea of linguistic determinism, largely due to a study by Peter Gordon which examines the language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil. According to Gordon, the language used by this tribe only contains three counting words: one, two and many. Gordon shows through a series of experiments that the people of the Pirahã tribe have difficulty recounting numbers higher than three (Gordon, 2004). However, the causal relationship of these events is not clear. Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count numbers higher than three for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary.

Fictional presence

George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is a striking example of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity in fiction, in which a language known as Newspeak has trimmed and supplanted Modern English. In this case, Orwell says that if humans cannot form the words to express a revolution, then they cannot revolt. All of the theory of Newspeak is aimed at eliminating such words. For example, bad has been replaced by ungood, and free has been eliminated over time.

In Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune and its sequels, the Principle of Linguistic Relativity first appears when a character (Jessica Atreides) with extensive linguistic training encounters a foreign tribe (the Fremen). She is shocked by the "violence" of their language, as she believes their word choices and language structure reflect a culture of enormous violence.

Samuel R. Delany's novel Babel-17 is centered on a fictional language that denies its speakers independent thought, forcing them to think purely logical thoughts. This language is used as a weapon of war, because it is supposed to convert everyone who learns it to a traitor. In the novel, the language Babel-17 is likened to computer programming languages that do not allow errors or imprecise statements.

Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash revolves around the notion that the Sumerian language was a programming language for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter program or nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different tongues as a protection against Asherah.

Suzette Haden Elgin's science fiction novel Native Tongue describes a patriarchal society in which the overriding priority of the oppressed women is the secret development of a "feminist" language to aid them in throwing off their shackles.

Ursula K. Le Guin has a book called The Dispossessed about a society with no words for ownership or possession.

Quotations

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. 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... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation." (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69)

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. 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 kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in 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. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." (Whorf, 1940, pp. 213–14)

"Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling." (Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994), p. 64)

Fictional examples

The Dispossessed—novel by Ursula K. Le Guin that describes a fictional anarchist culture where use of the possessive case is taboo
The Languages of Pao—science fiction novel by Jack Vance depicting a social engineer who designs new languages for societies that wish to change their lot
Babel-17—science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany that supposes that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is strongly true, depicting a fictional language, Babel-17, which causes anyone who learns it to become a traitor to their political organisation
The Embedding—science fiction novel by Ian Watson that extends the exploration of the theme to include computational ramifications, especially those concerning the difficulty of comprehending examples of center embedding
Newspeak—fictional language described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed to constrict thought to support the totalitarian regime of that book
Anthem—Ayn Rand's short novel where the word "I" is prohibited by a collectivist state
Speedtalk —a language found in Robert A. Heinlein's short story "Gulf", which is designed to increase the speed of thinking by expressing concepts more compactly.
Linguistic determinism plays a part in Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land, in which learning to speak Martian changes the characters' personality and philosophy.
Iain M. Banks' fictional anarcho-socialist civilisation, The Culture, has developed a language called Marain "with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable".
In Star Wars Episode I, where Qui-Gon Jinn states, "Your focus determines your reality".
Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin describing a society of oppressed women inventing a secret language to preserve feminist concepts.
In Lila, the sequal to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig discusses this theory and its implications. Although he does not mention the theory by name, he quotes antropologist Edward Sapir.

External links

Which comes first, language or thought?
Language may shape human thought
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothes - two basic principles: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothes in Quotes
[1] An article that mentions a 10% difference in a poll depending on whether "gay and lesbian" or "homosexual" was used.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Contents

History

Criticism

Linguistic determinism

Fictional presence

Quotations

Further reading

Empirical examples

Fictional examples

External links

See also

Topics

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