LANGUAGE LEARNING | NEUROLINGUISTICS | SCIENCE

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

How the languages you use influence your thinking

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in the abbreviation SWH), also known as the “linguistic relativity hypothesis”, states that the cognitive development of each human being is influenced by the language he speaks.

In its most extreme form, this hypothesis assumes that the way of expressing determines the way of thinking.

The hypothesis is named after the American linguist and anthropologist of German origin Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941).

The position that the language is anchored to thought had been convincingly theorized by Bhartṛhari in the seventh century and was the subject of centuries-old debates in the Indian linguistic tradition.

Similar notions in the West, such as the axiom for which language has control effects on thought, can be traced back to an essay by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium, “On the comparative study of languages” and the notion has been largely assimilated in Western thought.

In 1976, Karl Kerenyi put this note before the translation of his Dionysus:

“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, but are a 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 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be traced back to the work of the German Franz Boas, founder of anthropology in the United States and master of Sapir.

In the United States, Boas came across Native American languages ​​belonging to several language families; all of these were very different from the Semitic and Indo-European languages ​​studied by many European intellectuals.

Boas realized how lifestyles and grammatical categories varied greatly from place to place; as a result, he came to believe that a people’s culture and lifestyles were reflected in the language they spoke.

Sapir was one of Boas’ brightest pupils. He continued Boas’ study noting that languages ​​are organic and formally complete systems.

Therefore, it was not this or that particular word that expressed a particular way of thinking or behaving, but the coherent and systematic nature of the language interacted on a wider level with thought and behavior.

As his views changed over time, it seems that towards the end of his life Sapir came to believe that the language did not merely reflect the usual culture and actions, but that the language and thought could actually be in a relationship of mutual influence or perhaps even of mutual determination.

Whorf gave this idea greater precision by examining the particular grammatical mechanisms with which thought influenced language.

Thus argued his concept:

«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.»

The careful analysis conducted by Whorf on the differences between English and the Hopi language, in an example that has now become famous, raised the standards for the analysis of the relationship between language, thought and reality, based on an accurate analysis of the grammatical structure rather than a more impressionistic account of the differences between, for example, morphemes in a language.

For example, the “Standard Average European” tends to analyze reality as objects in space: the present and the future are considered “places”, and time is a path that connects them.

A sentence like “three days” is grammatically equivalent to “three apples” or “three kilometers”. Other languages, including many Native American languages, are process-oriented.

For monoglots speakers of these languages, the concrete / spatial metaphors of SAE grammar may make little sense.

Whorf himself claimed that his job on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was inspired by the intuition that a Hopi speaker would find relativistic physics fundamentally easier to understand than a European speaker.

As a consequence of his status as a student and not as a professional linguist, Whorf’s work on linguistic relativity, conducted largely in the second half of the 1930s, became popular only after the posthumous publication of his writings in the 1950s.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis influenced the development and standardization of interlingua in the first half of the 20th century, but this was largely due to Sapir’s direct participation.

In 1955 James Cook Brown created the artificial loglan language (of which lojban is a reformed variant that still exists as a living language) to test the hypothesis.

However, no experiment in this regard was ever conducted.

The linguistic theories of the sixties, like those proposed by Noam Chomsky, focused on the innatism and universality of the language; as a result, Whorf’s work was overshadowed.

In the late 1980s and the beginning of the following decade, advances in cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

An example of a Chomskian approach to the matter is Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct, while a closer approach to Whorf could be represented by authors such as George Lakoff, who speculated that political arguments, for example, are forged by a spider web of conceptual metaphors which are subtended in the use of language.

Researchers today disagree, often strongly, about the degree of influence of language on thought, however this discord has stimulated a growing interest in the field and a large number of innovative research.

A possible argument against the integral version of this hypothesis, a Weltanschauung in which most of the thought is channeled by language, can be discovered through personal experience: everyone has sometimes had difficulty expressing himself due to the limitations of the language and they are aware that the language is not adequate for what they mean.

Maybe they write or say something and then think “it’s not exactly what I mean”, or maybe they can’t find a good way to explain a concept to a pupil.

This makes it clear that what is thought is not a series of words, because one can understand a concept without being able to express it in words.

Furthermore, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were considered true as it was formulated by the two scholars, it could be said that bilinguals possess two different world views deriving from the knowledge of two languages ​​and their use to organize their mental reasoning extreme on the other hand, the fact that language does not influence thought at all must also be considered false.

For example, it has been shown that the distinction of similar colors can be influenced by how the language organizes their names (but this purely proves that the skills to signal the difference in color is linked to language: however much the subject can perceive two different colors, could not, with years of practice, indicate that he sees two different colors).

Another study showed that deaf children hearing parents may be incapable of some cognitive tasks not related to hearing, unlike deaf children of deaf parents, due to the greater difficulty of hearing parents in sign language.

Among the most cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf’s study of Inuit language, which uses different words to indicate snow.

He concludes that this fact modifies the Inuit’s worldview, creates a different way of existence compared, for example, to English-speaking speakers.

The notion that Arctic peoples have a large number of words to indicate snow has been refuted by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum in an essay titled The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax: he traces the origin of the story, attributing it ultimately largely in Whorf.

In particular, it highlights the banality of the theory. The fact that wine lovers have a rich vocabulary to describe the nuances of taste of wines is not considered as proof that their mind works differently, but it is only that they know more about wine than the average.

English speaking skiers will have probably also a large vocabulary related to snow (Beyond the conclusions on the question of snow, it must be borne in mind that Whorf’s theory focused on grammatical categories, especially the hidden ones, present in each language, not on lexical groups).

These ideas have found some resistance in the linguistic community.

Various studies on the perception of colors in different cultures have come to contrasting points of view.

Kevin Buddaeus Amy Marley Salam Khan Dennett Maïa Belart Steven Anthony Livia Dabs Terry Mansfield Daniel Clark Shin Jie Yong Susanna Petersson Alberta Skyter Jo Ann Harris Laura Manipura George J. Ziogas Elisabeth Khan Aurora Eliam, CMP Desiree Driesenaar Dr Mehmet Yildiz