linguistic relativity hypothesis definition psychology

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis)

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There are about seven thousand languages heard around the world – they all have different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. As you know, language plays a significant role in our lives.

But one intriguing question is – can it actually affect how we think?

It is widely thought that reality and how one perceives the world is expressed in spoken words and are precisely the same as reality.

That is, perception and expression are understood to be synonymous, and it is assumed that speech is based on thoughts. This idea believes that what one says depends on how the world is encoded and decoded in the mind.

However, many believe the opposite.

In that, what one perceives is dependent on the spoken word. Basically, that thought depends on language, not the other way around.

What Is The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

Twentieth-century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf are known for this very principle and its popularization. Their joint theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or, more commonly, the Theory of Linguistic Relativity, holds great significance in all scopes of communication theories.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the grammatical and verbal structure of a person’s language influences how they perceive the world. It emphasizes that language either determines or influences one’s thoughts.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that people experience the world based on the structure of their language, and that linguistic categories shape and limit cognitive processes. It proposes that differences in language affect thought, perception, and behavior, so speakers of different languages think and act differently.

For example, different words mean various things in other languages. Not every word in all languages has an exact one-to-one translation in a foreign language.

Because of these small but crucial differences, using the wrong word within a particular language can have significant consequences.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is sometimes called “linguistic relativity” or the “principle of linguistic relativity.” So while they have slightly different names, they refer to the same basic proposal about the relationship between language and thought.

How Language Influences Culture

Culture is defined by the values, norms, and beliefs of a society. Our culture can be considered a lens through which we undergo the world and develop a shared meaning of what occurs around us.

The language that we create and use is in response to the cultural and societal needs that arose. In other words, there is an apparent relationship between how we talk and how we perceive the world.

One crucial question that many intellectuals have asked is how our society’s language influences its culture.

Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his then-student Benjamin Whorf were interested in answering this question.

Together, they created the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that our thought processes predominantly determine how we look at the world.

Our language restricts our thought processes – our language shapes our reality. Simply, the language that we use shapes the way we think and how we see the world.

Since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theorizes that our language use shapes our perspective of the world, people who speak different languages have different views of the world.

In the 1920s, Benjamin Whorf was a Yale University graduate student studying with linguist Edward Sapir, who was considered the father of American linguistic anthropology.

Sapir was responsible for documenting and recording the cultures and languages of many Native American tribes disappearing at an alarming rate. He and his predecessors were well aware of the close relationship between language and culture.

Anthropologists like Sapir need to learn the language of the culture they are studying to understand the worldview of its speakers truly. Whorf believed that the opposite is also true, that language affects culture by influencing how its speakers think.

His hypothesis proposed that the words and structures of a language influence how its speaker behaves and feels about the world and, ultimately, the culture itself.

Simply put, Whorf believed that you see the world differently from another person who speaks another language due to the specific language you speak.

Human beings do not live in the matter-of-fact world alone, nor solitary in the world of social action as traditionally understood, but are very much at the pardon of the certain language which has become the medium of communication and expression for their society.

To a large extent, the real world is unconsciously built on habits in regard to the language of the group. We hear and see and otherwise experience broadly as we do because the language habits of our community predispose choices of interpretation.

Studies & Examples

The lexicon, or vocabulary, is the inventory of the articles a culture speaks about and has classified to understand the world around them and deal with it effectively.

For example, our modern life is dictated for many by the need to travel by some vehicle – cars, buses, trucks, SUVs, trains, etc. We, therefore, have thousands of words to talk about and mention, including types of models, vehicles, parts, or brands.

The most influential aspects of each culture are similarly reflected in the dictionary of its language. Among the societies living on the islands in the Pacific, fish have significant economic and cultural importance.

Therefore, this is reflected in the rich vocabulary that describes all aspects of the fish and the environments that islanders depend on for survival.

For example, there are over 1,000 fish species in Palau, and Palauan fishers knew, even long before biologists existed, details about the anatomy, behavior, growth patterns, and habitat of most of them – far more than modern biologists know today.

Whorf’s studies at Yale involved working with many Native American languages, including Hopi. He discovered that the Hopi language is quite different from English in many ways, especially regarding time.

Western cultures and languages view times as a flowing river that carries us continuously through the present, away from the past, and to the future.

Our grammar and system of verbs reflect this concept with particular tenses for past, present, and future.

We perceive this concept of time as universal in that all humans see it in the same way.

Although a speaker of Hopi has very different ideas, their language’s structure both reflects and shapes the way they think about time. Seemingly, the Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense; instead, they divide the world into manifested and unmanifest domains.

The manifested domain consists of the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past, and the future; the unmanifest domain consists of the remote past and the future and the world of dreams, thoughts, desires, and life forces.

Also, there are no words for minutes, minutes, or days of the week. Native Hopi speakers often had great difficulty adapting to life in the English-speaking world when it came to being on time for their job or other affairs.

It is due to the simple fact that this was not how they had been conditioned to behave concerning time in their Hopi world, which followed the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun.

Today, it is widely believed that some aspects of perception are affected by language.

One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis derives from the idea that if a person’s language has no word for a specific concept, then that person would not understand that concept.

Honestly, the idea that a mother tongue can restrict one’s understanding has been largely unaccepted. For example, in German, there is a term that means to take pleasure in another person’s unhappiness.

While there is no translatable equivalent in English, it just would not be accurate to say that English speakers have never experienced or would not be able to comprehend this emotion.

Just because there is no word for this in the English language does not mean English speakers are less equipped to feel or experience the meaning of the word.

Not to mention a “chicken and egg” problem with the theory.

Of course, languages are human creations, very much tools we invented and honed to suit our needs. Merely showing that speakers of diverse languages think differently does not tell us whether it is the language that shapes belief or the other way around.

Supporting Evidence

On the other hand, there is hard evidence that the language-associated habits we acquire play a role in how we view the world. And indeed, this is especially true for languages that attach genders to inanimate objects.

There was a study done that looked at how German and Spanish speakers view different things based on their given gender association in each respective language.

The results demonstrated that in describing things that are referred to as masculine in Spanish, speakers of the language marked them as having more male characteristics like “strong” and “long.” Similarly, these same items, which use feminine phrasings in German, were noted by German speakers as effeminate, like “beautiful” and “elegant.”

The findings imply that speakers of each language have developed preconceived notions of something being feminine or masculine, not due to the objects” characteristics or appearances but because of how they are categorized in their native language.

It is important to remember that the Theory of Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) also successfully achieves openness. The theory is shown as a window where we view the cognitive process, not as an absolute.

It is set forth to look at a phenomenon differently than one usually would. Furthermore, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is very simple and logically sound. Understandably, one’s atmosphere and culture will affect decoding.

Likewise, in studies done by the authors of the theory, many Native American tribes do not have a word for particular things because they do not exist in their lives. The logical simplism of this idea of relativism provides parsimony.

Truly, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis makes sense. It can be utilized in describing great numerous misunderstandings in everyday life. When a Pennsylvanian says “yuns,” it does not make any sense to a Californian, but when examined, it is just another word for “you all.”

The Linguistic Relativity Theory addresses this and suggests that it is all relative. This concept of relativity passes outside dialect boundaries and delves into the world of language – from different countries and, consequently, from mind to mind.

Is language reality honestly because of thought, or is it thought which occurs because of language? The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis very transparently presents a view of reality being expressed in language and thus forming in thought.

The principles rehashed in it show a reasonable and even simple idea of how one perceives the world, but the question is still arguable: thought then language or language then thought?

Modern Relevance

Regardless of its age, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the Linguistic Relativity Theory, has continued to force itself into linguistic conversations, even including pop culture.

The idea was just recently revisited in the movie “Arrival,” – a science fiction film that engagingly explores the ways in which an alien language can affect and alter human thinking.

And even if some of the most drastic claims of the theory have been debunked or argued against, the idea has continued its relevance, and that does say something about its importance.

Hypotheses, thoughts, and intellectual musings do not need to be totally accurate to remain in the public eye as long as they make us think and question the world – and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis does precisely that.

The theory does not only make us question linguistic theory and our own language but also our very existence and how our perceptions might shape what exists in this world.

There are generalities that we can expect every person to encounter in their day-to-day life – in relationships, love, work, sadness, and so on. But thinking about the more granular disparities experienced by those in diverse circumstances, linguistic or otherwise, helps us realize that there is more to the story than ours.

And beautifully, at the same time, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis reiterates the fact that we are more alike than we are different, regardless of the language we speak.

Isn’t it just amazing that linguistic diversity just reveals to us how ingenious and flexible the human mind is – human minds have invented not one cognitive universe but, indeed, seven thousand!

Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What is the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis?. American anthropologist, 86(1), 65-79.

Whorf, B. L. (1952). Language, mind, and reality. ETC: A review of general semantics, 167-188.

Whorf, B. L. (1997). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In Sociolinguistics (pp. 443-463). Palgrave, London.

Whorf, B. L. (2012). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT press.

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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: How Language Influences How We Express Ourselves

Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

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What to Know About the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Real-world examples of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativity in psychology.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the language a person speaks can influence their worldview, thought, and even how they experience and understand the world.

While more extreme versions of the hypothesis have largely been discredited, a growing body of research has demonstrated that language can meaningfully shape how we understand the world around us and even ourselves.

Keep reading to learn more about linguistic relativity, including some real-world examples of how it shapes thoughts, emotions, and behavior.  

The hypothesis is named after anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. While the hypothesis is named after them both, the two never actually formally co-authored a coherent hypothesis together.

This Hypothesis Aims to Figure Out How Language and Culture Are Connected

Sapir was interested in charting the difference in language and cultural worldviews, including how language and culture influence each other. Whorf took this work on how language and culture shape each other a step further to explore how different languages might shape thought and behavior.

Since then, the concept has evolved into multiple variations, some more credible than others.

Linguistic Determinism Is an Extreme Version of the Hypothesis

Linguistic determinism, for example, is a more extreme version suggesting that a person’s perception and thought are limited to the language they speak. An early example of linguistic determinism comes from Whorf himself who argued that the Hopi people in Arizona don’t conjugate verbs into past, present, and future tenses as English speakers do and that their words for units of time (like “day” or “hour”) were verbs rather than nouns.

From this, he concluded that the Hopi don’t view time as a physical object that can be counted out in minutes and hours the way English speakers do. Instead, Whorf argued, the Hopi view time as a formless process.

This was then taken by others to mean that the Hopi don’t have any concept of time—an extreme view that has since been repeatedly disproven.

There is some evidence for a more nuanced version of linguistic relativity, which suggests that the structure and vocabulary of the language you speak can influence how you understand the world around you. To understand this better, it helps to look at real-world examples of the effects language can have on thought and behavior.

Different Languages Express Colors Differently

Color is one of the most common examples of linguistic relativity. Most known languages have somewhere between two and twelve color terms, and the way colors are categorized varies widely. In English, for example, there are distinct categories for blue and green .

Blue and Green

But in Korean, there is one word that encompasses both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see blue, it just means blue is understood as a variant of green rather than a distinct color category all its own.

In Russian, meanwhile, the colors that English speakers would lump under the umbrella term of “blue” are further subdivided into two distinct color categories, “siniy” and “goluboy.” They roughly correspond to light blue and dark blue in English. But to Russian speakers, they are as distinct as orange and brown .

In one study comparing English and Russian speakers, participants were shown a color square and then asked to choose which of the two color squares below it was the closest in shade to the first square.

The test specifically focused on varying shades of blue ranging from “siniy” to “goluboy.” Russian speakers were not only faster at selecting the matching color square but were more accurate in their selections.

The Way Location Is Expressed Varies Across Languages

This same variation occurs in other areas of language. For example, in Guugu Ymithirr, a language spoken by Aboriginal Australians, spatial orientation is always described in absolute terms of cardinal directions. While an English speaker would say the laptop is “in front of” you, a Guugu Ymithirr speaker would say it was north, south, west, or east of you.

As a result, Aboriginal Australians have to be constantly attuned to cardinal directions because their language requires it (just as Russian speakers develop a more instinctive ability to discern between shades of what English speakers call blue because their language requires it).

So when you ask a Guugu Ymithirr speaker to tell you which way south is, they can point in the right direction without a moment’s hesitation. Meanwhile, most English speakers would struggle to accurately identify South without the help of a compass or taking a moment to recall grade school lessons about how to find it.

The concept of these cardinal directions exists in English, but English speakers aren’t required to think about or use them on a daily basis so it’s not as intuitive or ingrained in how they orient themselves in space.

Just as with other aspects of thought and perception, the vocabulary and grammatical structure we have for thinking about or talking about what we feel doesn’t create our feelings, but it does shape how we understand them and, to an extent, how we experience them.

Words Help Us Put a Name to Our Emotions

For example, the ability to detect displeasure from a person’s face is universal. But in a language that has the words “angry” and “sad,” you can further distinguish what kind of displeasure you observe in their facial expression. This doesn’t mean humans never experienced anger or sadness before words for them emerged. But they may have struggled to understand or explain the subtle differences between different dimensions of displeasure.

In one study of English speakers, toddlers were shown a picture of a person with an angry facial expression. Then, they were given a set of pictures of people displaying different expressions including happy, sad, surprised, scared, disgusted, or angry. Researchers asked them to put all the pictures that matched the first angry face picture into a box.

The two-year-olds in the experiment tended to place all faces except happy faces into the box. But four-year-olds were more selective, often leaving out sad or fearful faces as well as happy faces. This suggests that as our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

But some research suggests the influence is not limited to just developing a wider vocabulary for categorizing emotions. Language may “also help constitute emotion by cohering sensations into specific perceptions of ‘anger,’ ‘disgust,’ ‘fear,’ etc.,” said Dr. Harold Hong, a board-certified psychiatrist at New Waters Recovery in North Carolina.

As our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

Words for emotions, like words for colors, are an attempt to categorize a spectrum of sensations into a handful of distinct categories. And, like color, there’s no objective or hard rule on where the boundaries between emotions should be which can lead to variation across languages in how emotions are categorized.

Emotions Are Categorized Differently in Different Languages

Just as different languages categorize color a little differently, researchers have also found differences in how emotions are categorized. In German, for example, there’s an emotion called “gemütlichkeit.”

While it’s usually translated as “cozy” or “ friendly ” in English, there really isn’t a direct translation. It refers to a particular kind of peace and sense of belonging that a person feels when surrounded by the people they love or feel connected to in a place they feel comfortable and free to be who they are.

Harold Hong, MD, Psychiatrist

The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion.

You may have felt gemütlichkeit when staying up with your friends to joke and play games at a sleepover. You may feel it when you visit home for the holidays and spend your time eating, laughing, and reminiscing with your family in the house you grew up in.

In Japanese, the word “amae” is just as difficult to translate into English. Usually, it’s translated as "spoiled child" or "presumed indulgence," as in making a request and assuming it will be indulged. But both of those have strong negative connotations in English and amae is a positive emotion .

Instead of being spoiled or coddled, it’s referring to that particular kind of trust and assurance that comes with being nurtured by someone and knowing that you can ask for what you want without worrying whether the other person might feel resentful or burdened by your request.

You might have felt amae when your car broke down and you immediately called your mom to pick you up, without having to worry for even a second whether or not she would drop everything to help you.

Regardless of which languages you speak, though, you’re capable of feeling both of these emotions. “The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion,” Dr. Hong explained.

What This Means For You

“While having the words to describe emotions can help us better understand and regulate them, it is possible to experience and express those emotions without specific labels for them.” Without the words for these feelings, you can still feel them but you just might not be able to identify them as readily or clearly as someone who does have those words. 

Rhee S. Lexicalization patterns in color naming in Korean . In: Raffaelli I, Katunar D, Kerovec B, eds. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. Vol 78. John Benjamins Publishing Company; 2019:109-128. Doi:10.1075/sfsl.78.06rhe

Winawer J, Witthoft N, Frank MC, Wu L, Wade AR, Boroditsky L. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104(19):7780-7785.  10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Lindquist KA, MacCormack JK, Shablack H. The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism . Front Psychol. 2015;6. Doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00444

By Rachael Green Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

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Linguistic Relativity by Peggy Li , David Barner LAST REVIEWED: 30 August 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0026

Linguistic relativity, sometimes called the Whorfian hypothesis, posits that properties of language affect the structure and content of thought and thus the way humans perceive reality. A distinction is often made between strong Whorfian views, according to which the categories of thought are determined by language, and weak views, which argue that language influences thought without entirely determining its structure. Each view presupposes that for language to affect thought, the two must in some way be separable. The modern investigation of linguistic relativity began with the contributions of Benjamin Lee Whorf and his mentor, Edward Sapir. Until recently, much experimental work has focused on determining whether any reliable Whorfian effects exist and whether effects truly reflect differences in thought caused by linguistic variation. Many such studies compare speakers of different languages or test subjects at different stages of language acquisition. Other studies explore how language affects cognition by testing prelinguistic infants or nonhuman animals and comparing these groups to children or adults. Significant progress has been made in several domains, including studies of color, number, objects, and space. In many areas, the status of findings is hotly debated.

Often, leading researchers in the field summarize their newest findings and views in edited collections. These volumes are good places to begin research into the topic of linguistic relativity. The listed volumes arose from papers presented at conferences, symposia, and workshops devoted to the topic. Gumperz and Levinson 1996 arose from a symposium that revived interest in the linguistic relativity hypothesis, leading to a wave of new research on the topic. Highlights of this work are reported in Bowerman and Levinson 2001 , Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003 , and Malt and Wolff 2010 .

Bowerman, Melissa, and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2001. Language acquisition and conceptual development . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511620669

This volume brings together research on language acquisition and conceptual development and asks about the relation between them in early childhood.

Gentner, Dedre, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, eds. 2003. Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The volume starts with a collection of perspective papers and then showcases papers that bring data to bear to test claims of linguistic relativity. The papers are delineated on the basis of the types of language effects on thought: language as a tool kit, language as a lens, and language as a category maker.

Gumperz, John J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 1996. Rethinking linguistic relativity . Papers presented at the Werner-Gren Symposium 112, held in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in May 1991. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

A collection of papers arising from the “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity” Wenner-Gren Symposium in 1991 that brought about renewed interest in the topic.

Malt, Barbara C., and Phillip M. Wolff. 2010. Words and the mind: How words capture human experience . Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Researchers across disciplines (linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists) contributed to this collection of papers documenting new advances in language-thought research in various domains (space, emotions, body parts, causation, etc.).

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Supplement to Relativism

The linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between languages will suffice for our purposes.

There are around 5000 languages in use today, and each is quite different from many of the others. Differences are especially pronounced between languages of different families, e.g., between Indo-European languages like English and Hindi and Ancient Greek, on the one hand, and non-Indo-European languages like Hopi and Chinese and Swahili, on the other.

Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis , after the linguists who made if famous. But the label linguistic relativity , which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf's views, which are an endless subject of exegetical dispute (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996, contains a sampling of recent literature on the hypothesis).

The suggestion that different languages carve the world up in different ways, and that as a result their speakers think about it differently has a certain appeal. But questions about the extent and kind of impact that language has on thought are empirical questions that can only be settled by empirical investigation. And although linguistic relativism is perhaps the most popular version of descriptive relativism, the conviction and passion of partisans on both sides of the issue far outrun the available evidence. As usual in discussions of relativism, it is important to resist all-or-none thinking. The key question is whether there are interesting and defensible versions of linguistic relativism between those that are trivially true (the Babylonians didn't have a counterpart of the word ‘telephone’, so they didn't think about telephones) and those that are dramatic but almost certainly false (those who speak different languages see the world in completely different ways).

A Preliminary Statement of the Hypothesis

Interesting versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis embody two claims:

Linguistic Diversity : Languages, especially members of quite different language families, differ in important ways from one another. Linguistic Influence on Thought : The structure and lexicon of one's language influences how one perceives and conceptualizes the world, and they do so in a systematic way.

Together these two claims suggest that speakers of quite different languages think about the world in quite different ways. There is a clear sense in which the thesis of linguistic diversity is uncontroversial. Even if all human languages share many underlying, abstract linguistic universals, there are often large differences in their syntactic structures and in their lexicons. The second claim is more controversial, but since linguistic forces could shape thought in varying degrees, it comes in more and less plausible forms.

1. History of the Hypothesis

Like many other relativistic themes, the hypothesis of linguistic relativity became a serious topic of discussion in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, particularly in the work of Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). It was later defended by thinkers as diverse as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Winch. Thus Cassirer tells us that

...the distinctions which here are taken for granted, the analysis of reality in terms of things and processes, permanent and transitory aspects, objects and actions, do not precede language as a substratum of given fact, but that language itself is what initiates such articulations, and develops them in its own sphere (1946, p. 12).

But the hypothesis came to prominence though the work of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. Indeed, it is often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , or simply the Whorf hypothesis .

There are connections among some of these writers; for example, Sapir wrote his M.A. thesis on Herder's Origin of Language . Still, this is a remarkably diverse group of thinkers who often arrived at their views by different routes, and so it is not surprising that the linguistic relativity hypothesis comes in a variety of forms.

Sapir and Whorf

It will help to see why the linguistic relativity hypothesis captivated so many thinkers if we briefly consider the more arresting claims of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir was an American anthropological linguist who, like so many anthropologists of his day, was a student of Franz Boas. He was also the teacher of Whorf, a businessman and amateur linguist.

Unlike earlier partisans of linguistic relativism, Sapir and Whorf based their claims on first-hand experience of the cultures and languages they described, which gave their accounts a good deal of immediacy. I will quote a few of the purpler passages to convey the flavor of their claims, for this was partly what galvanized the imagination of so many readers.

In a paper published in 1929 Sapir tells us:

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 (1929, p. 209).

Our language affects how we perceive things:

Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose. …We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (p. 210).

But the differences don't end with perception:

The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on 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 worlds with different labels attached (p. 209).

The linguistic relativity hypothesis grained its widest audience through the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose collected writings became something of a relativistic manifesto.

Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers than more timid claims would have been.

When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, “Standard Average European” or SAE) often do lead their speakers to have very different worldviews. Thus

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity , which holds that 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 relativity of all conceptual systems , ours included, and their dependence upon language stand revealed (1956, p. 214f, italics added). 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 (p. 213). …no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free (p. 214).

In fairness it must be stressed that these passages come from a single essay, “Science and Linguistics,” of 1940, and in other places Whorf's tone is often more measured. But not always; elsewhere he also says thing like

…users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world (1956, p. 221).

And in yet a third essay “facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulation of them” (1956, p. 235).

The passages from Sapir and Whorf bristle with metaphors of coercion: our thought is “at the mercy” of our language, it is “constrained” by it; no one is free to describe the world in a neutral way; we are “compelled” to read certain features into the world (p. 262). The view that language completely determines how we think is often called linguistic determinism . Hamann and Herder sometimes seem to equate language with thought, and in these moods, at least, they came close to endorsing this view.

1.1 Linguistic Relativism and Metaphysics

Some writers have linked these themes directly to issues in metaphysics. For example Graham (1989, Appendix 2) argues that there are vast differences among human languages and that many of the concepts or categories (e.g., physical object, causation, quantity) writers like Aristotle and Kant and Strawson held were central, even indispensable, to human thought, are nothing more than parochial shadows cast by the structure of Indo-European languages. These notions, it is said, have no counterparts in many non-Indo-European languages like Chinese. If this is so, then a fairly strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis might be true, but the thesis hasn't been backed with strong empirical evidence and the most common views today lie at the opposite end of the spectrum. Indeed, Whorf himself held a similar view:

[Western] Science …has not yet freed itself from the illusory necessities of common logic which are only at bottom necessities of grammatical pattern in Western Aryan grammar; [e.g.,] necessities for substances which are only necessities for substantives in certain sentence positions …(1956, pp. 269-270).

It is worth noting, finally, that although Whorf was certainly a descriptive relativist he was not a normative relativist . He believed that some languages gave rise to more accurate worldviews than others. Indeed, he thought that the Hopi worldview was superior in various ways to that of speakers of Indo-European languages (e.g., 1956, p. 55, p. 262).

2. The Many Versions of Linguistic Relativism

Any serious discussion of the linguistic relativity hypothesis requires us to answer three questions

• Which aspects of language influence which aspects of thought in some systematic way?
• What form does that influence take?
• How strong is that influence?

For example, certain features of syntax or of the lexicon might exert a causal influence on certain aspects of visual perception (e.g., on which colors we can discriminate), classification (e.g., on how we sort things by their color), or long-term memory (e.g., on which differences among colors we remember most accurately) in clearly specifiable ways. If there is such an influence we would also like to know what mechanisms mediate it, but until we have clearer answers to the first three questions, we are not well positioned to answer this.

Human languages are flexible and extensible, so most things that can be said in one can be approximated in another; if nothing else, words and phrases can be borrowed ( Schadenfreude , je ne sais quoi ). But what is easy to say in one language may be harder to say in a second, and this may make it easier or more natural or more common for speakers of the first language to think in a certain way than for speakers of the second language to do so. A concept or category may be more available in some linguistic communities than in others (e.g., Brown, 1956, pp. 307ff). In short, the linguistic relativity hypothesis comes in stronger and weaker forms, depending on the hypothesized forms and the hypothesized strength of the hypothesized influence.

Various aspects of language might affect cognition.

Grammar Languages can differ in their grammar or syntax. To take a simple example, typical word order may vary. In English, the common order is subject, verb, object. In Japanese it is subject, object, verb. In Welsh, verb, subject, object. Languages can differ in whether they make a distinction between intransitive verbs and adjectives. And there are many subtler sorts of grammatical difference as well. It should be noted that grammar here does not mean the prescriptive grammar we learned in grammar school, but the syntactic structure of a language; in this sense, a grammar comprises a set of rules (or some equivalent device) that can generate all and only the sentences of a given language. Lexicon Different languages have different lexicons (vocabularies), but the important point here is that the lexicons of different languages may classify things in different ways. For example, the color lexicons of some languages segment the color spectrum at different places. Semantics Different languages have different semantic features (over and above differences in lexical semantics) Metaphor Different languages employ different metaphors or employ them in different ways. Pragmatics It is increasingly clear that context plays a vital role in the use and understanding of language, and it is possible that differences in the way speakers of different languages use their languages in concrete settings affects their mental life.

For the most part discussions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis have focused on grammar and lexicon as independent variables. Thus, many of Whorf's claims, e.g., his claims about the way Hopi thought about time, were based on (what he took to be) large-scale differences between Hopi and Standard Average European that included grammatical and lexical differences (e.g., 1956, p. 158). Subsequence research by Ekkehart Malotki (e.g., 1983) and others suggests that Whorf's more dramatic claims were false, but the important point here is that the most prominent versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis involved large-scale features of language.

Language might influence many different aspects of thought. Most empirical work has focused, appropriately enough, on those aspects that are easiest to assess without relying on language. This is important, since we otherwise risk finding influences of one aspect of language on some related aspect of language , rather than on some aspect of thought. Commonly studied cognitive variables include perceptual discrimination, availability in memory, and classification.

2.1 Testing the Linguistic Relativity Hypotheses

In light of the vast literature on linguistic relativity hypotheses, one would expect that a good deal of careful experimental work had been done on the topic. It hasn't. Often the only evidence cited in favor of such hypotheses is to point to a difference between two languages and assert that it adds up to a difference in modes of thought. But this simply assumes what needs to be shown, namely that such linguistic differences give rise to cognitive differences. On the other hand, refutations of the hypothesis often target implausibly extreme versions of it or proceed as though refutations of it in one domain (e.g., color language and color cognition) show that it is false across the board.

2.2 Many Versions of the Hypothesis have not been Tested

A linguistic relativity hypothesis says that some particular aspect of language influences some particular aspect of cognition . Many different aspects of language could, for all we know, influence many different aspects of cognition. This means that a study showing that some particular aspect of language (e.g., the color lexicon of a language) does (or does not) influence some particular aspect of cognition (e.g., recognition memory of colors) does not tell us whether other aspects of language (e.g., the lexicon for spatial relations) influence other aspects of cognition (e.g., spatial reasoning). It does not even tell us whether the single aspect of language we focused on affects any aspects of thought besides the one we studied, or whether other aspects of language influence the single aspect of thought we examined.

The point here is not merely a theoretical one. When the mind is seen as all of a piece, whether it's the result of stepping through Piaget's universal stages of development, the output of universal learning mechanisms, or the operation of a general-purpose computer, confirming or disconfirming the hypothesis in one area (e.g., color) might bear on its status in other areas. But there is increasing evidence that the mind is, to at least some degree, modular, with different cognitive modules doing domain specific work (e.g., parsing syntax, recognizing faces) and processing different kinds of information in different kinds of ways. If this is right, there is less reason to expect that findings about the influence of language on one aspect of cognition will generalize to other aspects.

Only a handful of versions of the claim that linguistic feature X influences cognitive feature Y in way Z have ever been tested. Some can doubtless be ruled out on the basis of common sense knowledge or previous investigation. But many remain that have yet to be studied. Moreover, those that have been studied often have not been studied with the care they deserve. A few have, though, and we will now turn to them.

Example: Color Language and Color Cognition

Much of the most rigorous investigation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis involves color language and color cognition. In the 1950s and 60s, this was an area where linguistic relativity seemed quite plausible. On the one hand, there is nothing in the physics of light (e.g., in facts about surface spectral reflectances) that suggests drawing boundaries between colors at one place rather than another; in this sense our segmentations of the spectrum are arbitrary. On the one hand, it was well known that different languages had color terms that segmented the color spectrum at different places. So since nothing in the physics of color could determine how humans thought about color, it seemed natural to hypothesis that color cognition followed the grooves laid down by color language.

Color was also an auspicious object of study, because investigators could use Munsell color chips (a widely used, standardized set of chips of different colors) or similar stimulus materials with subjects in quite different locations, thus assuring that whatever differences they found in their dependent variables really did involve the same thing, color (as anchored in the chips), rather than something more nebulous.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's work (1969) on basic color terms did much to raise the quality of empirical work on the linguistic relativity hypothesis. And together with much subsequent work it strongly suggests that the strongest, across-the-board versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis are false when it comes to color language and color cognition. We now know that colors may be a rather special case, however, for although there is nothing in the physics of color that suggests particular segmentations of the spectrum, the opponent-process theory of color vision, now well confirmed, tells us that there are neurophysiological facts about human beings that influence many of the ways in which we perceive colors. We don't know of anything comparable innate mechanisms that would channel thought about social traits or biological classification of diseases in similarly deep grooves. There may well be cross-cultural similarities in the ways human beings think about these things, but we can't conclude this from the work on color.

3. Innateness and Linguistic Universals

The linguist Noam Chomsky has argued for almost half a century that human beings could only learn natural languages if they had a good deal of innate linguistic equipment to guide their way. He has characterized this equipment in different ways over the years, but the abiding theme is that without it children could never get from the sparse set of utterances they hear to the rich linguistic ability they achieve.

3.1 Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments

In just a few years all normal children acquire the language that is spoken by their family and others around them. They acquire a very complex and virtually unbounded ability to distinguish sentences from non-sentences and to understand and utter a virtually unlimited number of sentences they have never thought of before. The child acquires this ability on the basis of the utterances she hears and the feedback (rarely in the form of corrections) she receives. The problem is that the child's data here are very unsystematic and sparse compared to the systematic and nearly unbounded linguistic competence the child quickly acquires.

Hence, the argument continues, the child needs help to get from this impoverished input to the rich output (the acquisition of a grammar of a complex natural language), and this help can only be provided by something innate that constrains and guides the child in her construction of the grammar. The point is quite general: if the input, or data stream, is exiguous then (barring incredible luck) it is only possible for someone to arrive at the right theory about the data if they have some built-in inductive biases, some predispositions to form one kind of theory rather than another. And since any child can learn any human language, the innate endowment must put constraints on which of the countless logically possible languages are humanly possible.

If the features of human languages are limited by such innate, language-acquisition mechanisms, there is less scope for the large differences among languages that the more extreme linguistic relativists have imagined. But might linguistic universals leave room for less extreme versions of linguistic relativism that are still interesting? That depends on what linguistic devices there are and on their relationships to other cognitive mechanisms.

3.2 Modularity

From the perspective of nativist accounts of language, many of the questions about linguistic relativity boil down to questions about the informational encapsulation of mental modules. To say that a module is encapsulated means that other parts of the mind cannot influence its inner workings (though they can supply it with inputs and use its outputs). What are the implications of this for the linguistic relativist's claim that a person's language can exert a dramatic influence on his perception and thought?

The answer may be different for perception, on the one hand, and the higher mental processes, on the other. For example Jerry Fodor (1984) argues that there is a module (or modules) for visual perception and that information from other parts of the mind cannot influence it in the way that many psychologists have supposed. For example, even though I know that the two lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion

Müller-Lyer Illusion

are the same length, I cannot help seeing the line on the left as longer than the line on the right. I know the lengths are the same, but my visual module (or models) does not. It is encapsulated; this information can't get through to it, so it can't influence how I see the figure. If this is so, then linguistic information could not penetrate any vision modules, and so versions of linguistic relativism which hold (as most do) that our language can influence how we see things is wrong.

By contrast, Fodor holds that there is no special module for higher mental processes and, indeed, that we are a long way from having any account of how thinking and reasoning work (e.g., 2000). If this is right, then for all we know now, some aspects of linguistic relativism could be right. The workings of various linguistic modules might influence thought in interesting ways.

It bears stressing that many of the issues involving cognitive architecture are vigorously contested. Among other things, not all champions of modules see them as Fodor does. According to them what is special about visual modules may just be that they process visual information, not that they lack access to other kinds of information (indeed, top-down aspects of perception suggest that they often do have such access). If this is so, there is more room for language to influence perception and other cognitive processes than there is if modules are tightly insulated.

The dust here hasn't begun to settle, but one general moral is clear. If at least moderately strong nativist and modular views of the mind are on the right track--and there is now certainly some reason to think that they are--then many of the empirical issues about linguistic relativity will translate into issues concerning the ways in which various modules can influence one another.

4. Morals for other Independent Variables: Modularity and Encapsulation

We have gone into detail about the linguistic relativity hypothesis, because the main lessons here carry over to the study of the impact of other variables, e.g., culture, on cognition. Some of these emerged above; others are obvious once they are noted. They are

• Questions about the impact of a variable on cognition are empirical and causal questions.
• Such questions can only be answered with care once we specify which aspects of an independent variable, say culture, influence which aspects of thought and what form that influence takes.
• Such hypotheses can vary greatly in specificity, strength, and scope.
• Testing a specific version of the hypothesis requires a combination of skills, including those of a good ethnographer, linguist, and experimental psychologist.
• A comparison of more than two cultures is needed to draw any firm conclusions.
• The truth of specific hypotheses may turn on issues involving the modularity of mind and the degree of modular encapsulation.
• If the mind is highly modular, finding an influence of one aspect of language or culture of some aspect of cognition may tell us little about the influence of other aspects of language or culture on cognition.

These lessons are easier with some variables than with others. It is probably easiest with some aspects of language, because a good deal is now known about many of the languages of the world. It will often be more difficult in the case of culture, where things are more difficult to pin down than they are in the case of language. And it will be virtually impossible when history is the relevant variable; here much more speculative interpretations of historical documents may be the best we can do. But the basic point remains. Relativistic claims are empirical causal claims and they can only be settled by empirical evidence.

It is not always easy to strike the proper balance when thinking about empirical work on these matters. On the one hand it is useful to cultivate an “it-can't-be-that-simple” reflex for use when reading an isolated study or two. But on the other hand empirical investigation is the only thing that can answer many of the difficult questions about the complex, entangled processes of language, culture, and thought.

Return to Relativism: §1: A Framework for Relativism Return to Relativism: §2: Dependent Variables: What is Relative? Return to Relativism: §3: Independent Variables: Relative to What? Return to Relativism: §4: Arguments For Relativism Return to Relativism: §5: Arguments Against Relativism Return to Relativism: Table of Contents

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3.1: Linguistic Relativity- The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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• Manon Allard-Kropp
• University of Missouri–St. Louis

Learning Objectives

After completing this module, students will be able to:

1. Define the concept of linguistic relativity

2. Differentiate linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism

3. Define the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (against more pop-culture takes on it) and situate it in a broader theoretical context/history

4. Provide examples of linguistic relativity through examples related to time, space, metaphors, etc.

In this part, we will look at language(s) and worldviews at the intersection of language & thoughts and language & cognition (i.e., the mental system with which we process the world around us, and with which we learn to function and make sense of it). Our main question, which we will not entirely answer but which we will examine in depth, is a chicken and egg one: does thought determine language, or does language inform thought?

We will talk about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; look at examples that support the notion of linguistic relativity (pronouns, kinship terms, grammatical tenses, and what they tell us about culture and worldview); and then we will more specifically look into how metaphors are a structural component of worldview, if not cognition itself; and we will wrap up with memes. (Can we analyze memes through an ethnolinguistic, relativist lens? We will try!)

3.1 Linguistic Relativity: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

In the 1920s, Benjamin Whorf was a graduate student studying with linguist Edward Sapir at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Sapir, considered the father of American linguistic anthropology, was responsible for documenting and recording the languages and cultures of many Native American tribes, which were disappearing at an alarming rate. This was due primarily to the deliberate efforts of the United States government to force Native Americans to assimilate into the Euro-American culture. Sapir and his predecessors were well aware of the close relationship between culture and language because each culture is reflected in and influences its language. Anthropologists need to learn the language of the culture they are studying in order to understand the world view of its speakers. Whorf believed that the reverse is also true, that a language affects culture as well, by actually influencing how its speakers think. His hypothesis proposes that the words and the structures of a language influence how its speakers think about the world, how they behave, and ultimately the culture itself. (See our definition of culture in Part 1 of this document.) Simply stated, Whorf believed that human beings see the world the way they do because the specific languages they speak influence them to do so.

He developed this idea through both his work with Sapir and his work as a chemical engineer for the Hartford Insurance Company investigating the causes of fires. One of his cases while working for the insurance company was a fire at a business where there were a number of gasoline drums. Those that contained gasoline were surrounded by signs warning employees to be cautious around them and to avoid smoking near them. The workers were always careful around those drums. On the other hand, empty gasoline drums were stored in another area, but employees were more careless there. Someone tossed a cigarette or lighted match into one of the “empty” drums, it went up in flames, and started a fire that burned the business to the ground. Whorf theorized that the meaning of the word empty implied to the worker that “nothing” was there to be cautious about so the worker behaved accordingly. Unfortunately, an “empty” gasoline drum may still contain fumes, which are more flammable than the liquid itself.

Whorf ’s studies at Yale involved working with Native American languages, including Hopi. The Hopi language is quite different from English, in many ways. For example, let’s look at how the Hopi language deals with time. Western languages (and cultures) view time as a flowing river in which we are being carried continuously away from a past, through the present, and into a future. Our verb systems reflect that concept with specific tenses for past, present, and future. We think of this concept of time as universal, that all humans see it the same way. A Hopi speaker has very different ideas and the structure of their language both reflects and shapes the way they think about time. The Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense. Instead, it divides the world into what Whorf called the manifested and unmanifest domains. The manifested domain deals with the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past and future; the verb system uses the same basic structure for all of them. The unmanifest domain involves the remote past and the future, as well as the world of desires, thought, and life forces. The set of verb forms dealing with this domain are consistent for all of these areas, and are different from the manifested ones. Also, there are no words for hours, minutes, or days of the week. Native Hopi speakers often had great difficulty adapting to life in the English speaking world when it came to being “on time” for work or other events. It is simply not how they had been conditioned to behave with respect to time in their Hopi world, which followed the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun.

In a book about the Abenaki who lived in Vermont in the mid-1800s, Trudy Ann Parker described their concept of time, which very much resembled that of the Hopi and many of the other Native American tribes. “They called one full day a sleep, and a year was called a winter. Each month was referred to as a moon and always began with a new moon. An Indian day wasn’t divided into minutes or hours. It had four time periods—sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight. Each season was determined by the budding or leafing of plants, the spawning of fish, or the rutting time for animals. Most Indians thought the white race had been running around like scared rabbits ever since the invention of the clock.”

The lexicon , or vocabulary, of a language is an inventory of the items a culture talks about and has categorized in order to make sense of the world and deal with it effectively. For example, modern life is dictated for many by the need to travel by some kind of vehicle—cars, trucks, SUVs, trains, buses, etc. We therefore have thousands of words to talk about them, including types of vehicles, models, brands, or parts.

The most important aspects of each culture are similarly reflected in the lexicon of its language. Among the societies living in the islands of Oceania in the Pacific, fish have great economic and cultural importance. This is reflected in the rich vocabulary that describes all aspects of the fish and the environments that islanders depend on for survival. For example, in Palau there are about 1,000 fish species and Palauan fishermen knew, long before biologists existed, details about the anatomy, behavior, growth patterns, and habitat of most of them—in many cases far more than modern biologists know even today. Much of fish behavior is related to the tides and the phases of the moon. Throughout Oceania, the names given to certain days of the lunar months reflect the likelihood of successful fishing. For example, in the Caroline Islands, the name for the night before the new moon is otolol , which means “to swarm.” The name indicates that the best fishing days cluster around the new moon. In Hawai`i and Tahiti two sets of days have names containing the particle `ole or `ore ; one occurs in the first quarter of the moon and the other in the third quarter. The same name is given to the prevailing wind during those phases. The words mean “nothing,” because those days were considered bad for fishing as well as planting.

Parts of Whorf ’s hypothesis, known as linguistic relativity , were controversial from the beginning, and still are among some linguists. Yet Whorf ’s ideas now form the basis for an entire sub-field of cultural anthropology: cognitive or psychological anthropology. A number of studies have been done that support Whorf ’s ideas. Linguist George Lakoff ’s work looks at the pervasive existence of metaphors in everyday speech that can be said to predispose a speaker’s world view and attitudes on a variety of human experiences. A metaphor is an expression in which one kind of thing is understood and experienced in terms of another entirely unrelated thing; the metaphors in a language can reveal aspects of the culture of its speakers. Take, for example, the concept of an argument. In logic and philosophy, an argument is a discussion involving differing points of view, or a debate. But the conceptual metaphor in American culture can be stated as ARGUMENT IS WAR. This metaphor is reflected in many expressions of the everyday language of American speakers: I won the argument. He shot down every point I made. They attacked every argument we made. Your point is right on target . I had a fight with my boyfriend last night. In other words, we use words appropriate for discussing war when we talk about arguments, which are certainly not real war. But we actually think of arguments as a verbal battle that often involve anger, and even violence, which then structures how we argue.

To illustrate that this concept of argument is not universal, Lakoff suggests imagining a culture where an argument is not something to be won or lost, with no strategies for attacking or defending, but rather as a dance where the dancers’ goal is to perform in an artful, pleasing way. No anger or violence would occur or even be relevant to speakers of this language, because the metaphor for that culture would be ARGUMENT IS DANCE.

3.1 Adapted from Perspectives , Language ( Linda Light, 2017 )

You can either watch the video, How Language Shapes the Way We Think, by linguist Lera Boroditsky, or read the script below.

Watch the video: How Language Shapes the Way We Think ( Boroditsky, 2018)

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world—and they all have different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language—from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian—that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. “The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,” Boroditsky says. “Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.”

Video transcript:

So, I’ll be speaking to you using language ... because I can. This is one these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. So what I’m doing right now is, I’m making sounds with my mouth as I’m exhaling. I’m making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they’re hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. I hope.

I hope that’s happening. So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time. We’re able to transmit knowledge across minds. I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say, “Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics.”

Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven’t had that thought before.

But now I’ve just made you think it, through language.

Now of course, there isn’t just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures—very importantly, different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? Now, this is an ancient question. People have been speculating about this question forever. Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, “To have a second language is to have a second soul”—strong statement that language crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn’t craft reality.

These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years. But until recently, there hasn’t been any data to help us decide either way. Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we’ve started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question.

So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I’ll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had a chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What’s cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don’t use words like “left” and “right,” and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, “Oh, there’s an ant on your southwest leg.” Or, “Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit.” In fact, the way that you say “hello” in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, “Which way are you going?” And the answer should be, “North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?”

So imagine as you’re walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction.

But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn’t get past “hello,” if you didn’t know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: “Oh, we don’t have magnets in our beaks or in our scales.” No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well.

And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast.

Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don’t know which way it is myself—

You have not been a lot of help.

So let’s just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group—very distinguished group like you guys—doesn’t know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know.

There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left.

But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? They don’t use words like “left” and “right.” Let me give you hint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What’s the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn’t actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I’m facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I’m facing this way, then time goes this way. I’m facing this way, time goes this way— very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It’s a dramatically different way of thinking about time.

Here’s another really smart human trait. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. Well, I bet I know how you’d solve that problem if you solved it. You went, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.” You counted them. You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins. This is a little trick that you’re taught to use as kids. You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it. A little linguistic trick. Well, some languages don’t do this, because some languages don’t have exact number words. They’re languages that don’t have a word like “seven” or a word like “eight.” In fact, people who speak these languages don’t count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting. But folks who don’t have that linguistic trait can’t do that.

Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum—the visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, “light” and “dark.” And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there’s a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn’t a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, goluboy , and dark blue, siniy . So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors. When we test people’s ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They’re faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and a dark blue. And when you look at people’s brains as they’re looking at colors—say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue—the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, “Ooh, something has categorically changed,” whereas the brains of English speakers, for example, that don’t make this categorical distinction, don’t give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing.

Languages have all kinds of structural quirks. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languages have grammatical gender; so every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? Actually, it turns out that’s the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here—“bridge” happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish—German speakers are more likely to say bridges are “beautiful,” “elegant,” and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they’re “strong” or “long,” these masculine words.

Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? You take an event like this, an accident. In English, it’s fine to say, “He broke the vase.” In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, “The vase broke,” or “The vase broke itself.” If it’s an accident, you wouldn’t say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, “I broke my arm.” Now, in lots of languages, you couldn’t use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm—[laughter] and you succeeded. If it was an accident, you would use a different construction.

Now, this has consequences. So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, “He did it; he broke the vase.” Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it’s an accident, but they’re more likely to remember that it was an accident. They’re more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, “He broke the vase,” as opposed to “The vase broke,” even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, “He broke it,” as opposed to, “It broke.” The language guides our reasoning about events.

Now, I’ve given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deep effects—that’s what we saw with the case of number. Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. Of course, if you don’t count, you can’t do algebra, you can’t do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm.

Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all the time, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broad effects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language can shape how you’re thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. That’s a lot of stuff.

And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us—ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. These are important things in our daily lives.

Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000—there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And we can create many more—languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. The tragic thing is that we’re losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. We’re losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world’s languages will be gone in the next hundred years. And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. That excludes almost all humans. Right? So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better.

I want to leave you with this final thought. I’ve told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that’s not about how people elsewhere think. It’s about how you think. It’s how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, “Why do I think the way that I do?” “How could I think differently?” And also, “What thoughts do I wish to create?”

Thank you very much.

Read the following text on what lexical differences between language can tell us about those languages’ cultures.

Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

Have you ever heard that Inuits have over 100 words for snow? It’s a fascinating way to look at how different languages are shaped by the world around us. You might have also heard that this fact isn’t actually real.

Theories in psychology and science are always changing and evolving. There are many different schools of thought that suggest how humans see the world, communicate, or make decisions. And when a theory or concept gets popular, it may spread like wildfire, bringing false information with it.

I want to discuss a concept in psychology that has been up for debate for decades. The research surrounding this concept brought us the idea that Inuits have 100 words for snow! This video is about the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis.

What is the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis?

The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis began as linguistic determinism. This concept states that our language determines how we think and perceive the world. There are different levels of linguistic determinism, some that are “stronger” than others. “Weaker” forms of this idea suggest that language simply influences the way we think.

To people who only speak one language, the concept of linguistic determinism might be hard to grasp. There are many different languages, but we’re all saying the same things, right?

Not so much. Different languages, especially those spoken on different continents or in more isolated areas, have varying structures. Some languages contain tenses for the past, present, and future, like English. When we put events in a linear timeline, it’s not hard to see our world in a more linear fashion. That’s not exactly the case in other languages or cultures.

We can also look at how languages use (or don’t use) pronouns. Some languages have gendered pronouns for everything: the sun, the moon, a chair, a television, etc. Other languages only have gendered pronouns for people or a handful of objects. Others have different types of pronouns for animate objects, inanimate objects. “Fluid” gendered pronouns exist in some languages.

If we assign everything a gender, how might that influence the way we look at gender (or the objects assigned a specific gender?) If we put every event into a linear timeline, how might that influence the way we view history?

These are some of the questions that sparked the ideas of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis.

Linguistic Relativity

There are over 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. At least one-third of these languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. There are thousands of “extinct” languages, too.

If language determines the way that we think and see the world, what does this say about people who speak different languages?

This is where the second part of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis comes in, and why it’s also known as Linguistic Relativity. Linguistic Relativity states that because language determines how we think and perceive the world, people who speak different languages think and perceive the world differently.

Examples of Linguistic Relativity In Today’s Languages

Take the world Gezellig . Gezellig is a Dutch word that can’t exactly be translated to English. It describes a feeling of coziness, but it’s so much more than just an adjective. A visit to see close friends is Gezellig. The feeling of walking into your grandparent’s house can be Gezellig. Family reunions, relaxing coffee shops, or a connection with a new friend can all be Gezellig. 

One could argue that the existence of this word could explain how Dutch and English/American culture differs. Many language experts believe that Gezellig is the “heart of Dutch culture.” Americans simply don’t place the same emphasis on coziness and togetherness as the Dutch do.

When Americans do long for the cozy life, they look to European cultures. Gezellig describes a similar feeling and atmosphere as the Danish and Norwegian word Hygge. They’re not the same - while Gezellig usually describes a more sociable gathering or person, Hygge is more likely to describe physical comfort. Warm bowls of soup, sheepskin rugs, and extra fuzzy blankets are all crucial to the Hygge lifestyle. Since Denmark and Norway can be quite cold, it makes sense that Hygge is a favorable lifestyle. The differences in climate may also offer an explanation as to why Hygge cannot be directly translated in English.

How Linguistic Relativity May Be Used To Manipulate

Some experts believe that Sapir Whorf could be used to develop or explain how artificial intelligence can better communicate with humans. Understanding Sapir Whorf can also cause the manipulation of languages. Take Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984. Newspeak made it impossible for citizens to criticize the establishment. If you don’t have the language to criticize the establishment, how can you do it?

Films like Arrival also explore this idea. Of course, Arrival is a fictional movie and exaggerates what could be possible. But this idea continues to fascinate linguists, storytellers, and moviemakers.

History and Controversy Surrounding The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

Why is this hypothesis called the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis?

It’s not because someone named Sapir Whorf came up with it. Edward Sapir was a Polish-American anthropologist and linguist born in the late 19th century. He studied and classified indigenous languages, including the languages of Inuit tribes in Canada. Sapir believed the language could influence the way we think, but he was not a believer of strong linguistic determinism. He also did not conduct experiments on the way that language influenced thought.

Benjamin Whorf, born 13 years after Sapir, took his ideas and ran with it. Through his work, he suggested a stronger idea of linguistic relativity. He has been quoted as saying, “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.”

Not all linguists are on board with language’s impact on thought. Some of the hypothesis’ greatest critics are Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. British linguist Geoffery Pullum has also criticized the hypothesis with a paper called “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax .” You can guess what fun fact was included in that paper.

Despite claims to debunk the hypothesis, it still remains one of the more influential concepts in the world of linguistics. Two decades after Pullum published his paper, anthropologist Igor Krupnik published a book with his own research on Inuit languages. He found at least 100 terms for sea ice.

So does language determine how we think? Does it simply influence how we think? There is no right or wrong answer that all linguists can agree upon. There is still more work to be done - and while more languages become extinct every year, the time to do that work is now.

Related posts:

• Skinner’s Box Experiment (Behaviorism Study)
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP Definition + Examples)
• Facial Feedback Hypothesis (Definition + Examples)
• Acculturation (Definition + 20 Examples)
• Genie - The Feral Child

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Science Struck

Understanding Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis with Examples

Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, holds that the structure of the language natively spoken by people defines the way they view the world and interact with it. This post helps you understand this concept with the help of examples.

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“The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.” – Wilhelm von Humboldt

The linguistic relativity hypothesis posits that languages mold our cognitive faculties and determine the way we behave and interact in society. This hypothesis is also called the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis, which is actually a misnomer since Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored the theory. Rather, the theory was derived from the academic writings of Whorf, under the mentorship of Sapir. Hence the hypothesis is referred to as the principle of linguistic relativity. This nomenclature also acknowledges the fact that Sapir and Whorf were not the only ones to describe a link between thought and language, and also implies the existence of other chain of thoughts regarding this concept.

This theory has been widely mentioned in various diverse branches of social and behavioral sciences such as anthropology, linguistics, psychology, etc, but despite this, the validity of the theory is being disputed till date. Some scholars claim it to be trivially true, while others believe it to be refuted. To determine the validity and the logic behind the theory, one must therefore place the hypothesis within its historical context, find supporting empirical research finding, and finally examine the theoretical explanations and examples used to explain the relation between language and thought.

Linguistic Relativity: Hypothesis

The hypothesis presents two versions of the main principle – a strong version and a weak version. These versions arise from the way Sapir and Wharf have phrased and presented their ideas with the use of strong and weak words. The two versions of the hypothesis are as follows.

Strong Version – Language determines thought and controls the cognitive processes (linguistic determinism).

Weak version – Structure and usage of language influences thought and behavior (linguistic relativity).

The strong version of the hypothesis has largely been refuted, but the weaker versions are still being researched and debated as they often tend to produce positive empirical results.

Linguistic Relativity: Historical Context

♦ The possibility of thought being influenced by the language one spoke has sparked many a debates in various classical civilizations. In the Indian linguistic scholars, Bhartrihari (600 A.D.) was a major proponent on the relativistic nature of language. This same theory was also highly debated in ancient Greece between Plato and sophist thinkers such as Gorgias of Leontini. Plato believed that the world consisted of a pre-given set of ideas that were merely translated by language, whereas Gorgias held the belief that ones experience of the physical worlds was a direct function of language usage.

♦ The first clear idea of linguistic relativism was given in the early 19 th century by the German romantic philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt. He proposed that language was the fabric of thought, and that one’s thoughts were produced as a result of an internal dialog of a person in their native language. He also proposed that Indo-European languages such as German and English, that had the same basic syntax and structure were perfect languages, and that the speakers of such languages had a natural dominance over the speakers of other not-so-perfect languages.

♦ With this ideology in view, the American linguist William Dwight Whitney, in the 20 th century tried to eradicate the Native American languages by claiming that their speakers were savages and would be greatly benefited if they accepted English as the choice of language and chose a civilized way of life.

♦ Franz Boas was the first linguist to challenge this school of thought. He advocated equality between all cultures and languages. He did not believe in some languages being superior than others, but that all languages were equally capable of expressing any content but the way and means of expression differed. His student, Edward Sapir, believed in Humboldt’s idea that languages were the key to identify and understand the different ways in which different people viewed the world, and he improved on the idea and proposed that no two languages were ever similar enough to be perfectly translated, and that speakers of different languages would perceive reality differently. Despite this belief he strongly rejected the idea of linguistic determinism, claiming that it would be naive to believe that his experience of the world is solely dependent on the pattern and type of language he spoke.

♦ His vague notion of linguistic relativity was taken up and studied further by his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. He studied Native American languages, to prove that differences in grammatical systems of a language and its usage had a major effect on the way the speakers perceived the world. He also explained how scientific accounts of event differed from religious accounts of the same events. He explained his theories in the form of examples rather than in an argumentative form, to showcase the differences observed in behavior on use of different languages. He also claimed that certain exotic words referred to exotic meanings that were rather untranslatable.

♦ Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg widely criticized Whorf’s ideas and attempted to test them. They formulated his inferences into a testable hypothesis, which they named the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Linguistic Relativity: Empirical Research

Structure-centered Research – It involves the study of structural peculiarities in a language and the possible consequences it has on the thought process and behavior of the speaker. For example, the Hopi language expresses and describes time in a manner different from that of English, and hence the Hopi people perceive time differently than others.

Domain-centered Research – This involves choosing a semantic domain and comparing it across a wide range of different languages, to determine its relation to behavior. A common example of this type is, research on color terminologies or spatial categories in different languages.

Behavior-centered Research – This deals with studying various types of behavior among diverse linguistic groups and attempting to establish a viable cause for the development of that behavior.

Linguistic Relativity: Languages

Some philosophers have hypothesized that if our perceptions are influenced by language, it may be possible to influence thought by conscious manipulation of language. This has eventually led to the development of neurolinguistic programming, which is a therapeutic approach towards the use of language to seek and influence cognitive patterns and processes.

Artificial Languages

The same philosophy has given rise to the possibility of generating a new and better language that could enable newer and better ways of thinking. One such language is Loglan, created by James Cooke Brown in an attempt to test this possibility. The speakers of Loglan claim that the language increases their logical thinking skill.

Another such language was created by Suzette Haden Elgin, and it was called Láadan. It was designed to easily express a feminist world view. The language Ithkuil, designed and created by John Quijada, tries to use multiple cognitive categories at a single time, while simultaneously keeping its speakers aware of this.

Programming Languages

Kenneth E. Iverson, the originator of the APL programming language, proposes that the use of powerful notations in a programming language, enhances one’s ability to think about computer algorithms. Also a blub paradox comes into play in connection with linguistic relativity and use of programming languages. It states that any programmer using a particular programming language will be aware of the languages that are inferior to the one he is using, but will be oblivious of the languages that are superior to the language being used by him. The reasoning behind this paradox is that while a programmer is programming in a language, he starts thinking in that language as well, and is satisfied with it, as the language in turn dictates their opinion of the programs being produced.

Linguistic Relativity: Criticism

♦ Linguistic philosophers like Eric Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker have criticized the Whorfian hypothesis and do not accept most of the inferences about language and behavior put forth by Whorf. They claim that his conclusions are speculative since they are based on anecdotal evidence and not on results of empirical studies.

♦ Another criticism that this hypothesis faces is the problem of translatability. According to his theories, every language is unique in its description of reality. This would make translation of one language into another practically impossible. However, languages are regularly translated into each other every day, and hence challenges Whorf’s inference.

Linguistic Relativity: Examples

♦ Whorf observed two rooms at an gasoline plant. One room contained filled gasoline drums, while the other contained empty gasoline drums. The workers had a more relaxed and casual attitude toward the room housing the empty drums, and were seen to indulge in smoking in that room. The word “empty” may have suggested that the situation poses no harm, when in fact, smoking near the empty drums is also perilous, as they still contain leftover flammable vapors of gasoline.

♦ At a factory, metal containers were coated on the outside with spun limestone. Since the word “stone” was associated, the workers did not keep them away from heat or fire. Since spun limestone is a flammable substance, the workers were taken by surprise when the containers that were lined with “stone” caught fire.

♦ The Hopi language has one word to describe three different things. The same word implies an insect, an aviator, and an airplane. Hence, if a Hopi speaker witnesses an insect flying near an aviator, while looking at an airplane, she would claim to have seen the same thing (word) thrice, whereas an English speaker would describe it as seeing three different things.

With the current trend of people learning and excelling at languages that are not natively spoken by them, the concept of bilinguism has emerged. Since bilinguists can perceive and express experiences in native and foreign languages, the possibility of a unique perspective emerges and is interesting to study from a cognitive point of view.

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29 Linguistic Relativity

Eric Pederson (PhD 1991) is associate professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. The overarching theme of his research is the relationship between language and conceptual processes. He was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, working within Cognitive Linguistics with George Lakoff, Dan Slobin, Eve Sweetser, and Leonard Talmy since 1980. He joined the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in 1991 until 1997, where he began working on issues more specific to linguistic relativity. Relevant publications include “Geographic and Manipulable Space in Two Tamil Linguistic Systems” (1993); “Language as Context, Language as Means: Spatial Cognition and Habitual Language use” (1995); “Semantic Typology and Spatial Conceptualization” (with Eve Danziger, Stephen Levinson, Sotaro Kita, Gunter Senft, and David Wilkins, 1998); “Through the Looking Glass: Literacy, Writing Systems and Mirror Image Discrimination” (with Eve Danziger, 1998); and “Mirror-Image Discrimination among Nonliterate, Monoliterate, and Biliterate Tamil Speakers” (2003). In addition to linguistic relativity, his general interests include semantic typology, field/descriptive linguistics (South India), and the representation of events. Eric Pederson can be reached at [email protected].

• Published: 09 July 2015
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Linguistic relativity studies investigate effects of one’s native or habitual language patterns on non-linguistic cognitive processes. Many of these studies have fallen outside of the mainstream research paradigms. This chapter surveys the last fifty years of research in the topic and discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges facing such research.

29.1 Introduction

This chapter presents not a linguistic theory or model but a body of research falling under the cover term linguistic relativity . Most generally, linguistic relativity studies investigate possible effects of natural language on purportedly non-linguistic cognition. For example, a linguistic relativity study might look to see whether speakers of a language which uses obligatory plural marking are more prone to remember numbers of objects in a visual display than speakers of a language which seldom marks plurality (cf. Lucy 1992 a ).

While linguistic relativity is defined here as a domain of research (much like morphology or syntax), much of the work in this area is rather ideological in tone and argument both for and against the possibility of an effect of language on cognition. Proponents of linguistic relativity generally express a faith that language effects on cognition are likely broad and important however difficult this may be to demonstrate. Opponents of linguistic relativity generally express great skepticism that language is likely to have much causal role in non-linguistic behavior and tend to seize on any specific failures to clearly demonstrate a specific language effect on cognition as indicative of a general lack of such effects. Both sides of the debate appeal to broad theoretical assumptions within linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science in general for a philosophical underpinning of their positions. As a result, those working to discover any linguistic relativity effects are not unlike scholars working within a particular and controversial model of language.

Just as collections of authors are often bundled together in a volume presenting work within a single theoretical model, so too, do we find books sharing a common interest in exploring linguistic relativity as an empirical question. See especially the collections by often allied researchers in Gumperz and Levinson (1996 a ); Pütz and Verspoor (2000) ; and Gentner and Goldin-Meadow (2003) .

29.2 Historical Background

Following the work of Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf popularized the idea of linguistic relativity in the mid-20th century. From this, linguistic relativity is often termed the “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis”. This is somewhat of a misnomer for a number of reasons. One obvious problem is that many people have speculated on the effects of language on cognition in addition to Sapir and Whorf. Further, Whorf’s writings on the topic were essentially written independently from Sapir, so the “Sapir– Whorf hypothesis” is not actually a joint statement put forward by these two. Further-more, many popular conceptions of “Whorfianism” actually differ from Whorf’s own speculations—see Smith (1996) for a discussion. More fundamentally, the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis is not a genuine hypothesis. In science, a hypothesis is a specific claim formulated for empirical testing. One might have a hypothesis that native speakers of a particular language with a particular obligatory feature will be more sensitive to a corresponding feature in the environment or more likely to encode that feature in memory. On the other hand, a general statement that “language substantially influences thought” fails to be a falsifiable hypothesis.

There are nearly as many summaries of the history of linguistic relativity as there are articles describing original research in this area. For a general overview with particular sensitivity to cultural concerns, see Hill and Mannheim (1992) and Lucy (1996 , 1997 ). For a historical overview of Whorf’s work and its relationship to modern work in linguistic relativity, see Lucy (1992 b ) , Smith (1996) , and Lee (1996 , 2000 ). For a focus on the relationship of linguistic relativity to Cognitive Linguistics with particular concerns about methods, see Pederson (2007) .

Historically, much of the debate about linguistic relativity has centered on a broadly imputed “strong vs. weak hypothesis”. Certainly this is how the topic has been typically and cursorily treated in psychology textbooks. The alleged strong hypothesis states that language has a deterministic effect on the categories of cognition. Namely, the linguistic categories we learn as children lock us into congruent categories of thought. Given that people can successfully learn new second languages throughout their lives and indeed learn ways of thinking which were previously ineffable, the “strong” version is taken to be patently false. The “weak” version of the hypothesis states that there is an influence of linguistic categories in other areas of cognition. Work by Loftus and colleagues ( Loftus and Palmer 1974 ; Loftus 1975 ) and more recently Lindquist and colleagues ( Lindquist et al. 2006 ) studies the effects of immediate vocabulary choice on perception and memory within a single language. These studies amply demonstrate the power of language to influence non-linguistic cognition. Certainly good trial lawyers and authors know to manipulate lexical and constructional choice to their advantage. Such examples are taken to be true but trivial. That is, there is support for a “weak” version of linguistic relativity but this weak version is generally taken to be less interesting to cognitive science.

In short, the dichotomization of linguistic relativity concerns into a patently false strong position and a trivially true weak position only serves to reduce interest in the topic as a whole. Much of the work in modern linguistic relativity studies tries to avoid such broad oversimplification in favor of a more detailed model of language and cognition.

29.3 Requirements for Linguistic Relativity Research

Clearly, it is no simple matter to determine what, if any effect, speakers’ native languages have on their conceptualization of the world or on their cognitive patterns. Above all else, research in linguistic relativity requires considerable breadth of expertise (or co-operation among an interdisciplinary team of researchers). A description of the relevant features of at least two languages must be adequate to withstand the scrutiny of linguists working both with that language and in the domain under investigation (semantics/morphology/etc.). Further, it is not enough to observe that a language has a particular feature (e.g., obligatory plural marking or a morphological evidential system). The language description must also be sufficiently exhaustive to know to what extent certain concepts may be expressed and under what conditions (e.g., is there an optional plural marker and when is it used).

To this language expertise must be added adequate behavioral experimentation to determine patterns of cognition in different populations. This must be up to the standards of psychological research and may need to be conducted with population samples far from the usual laboratory setting. It can be quite challenging enough for psychologists to manage sufficient rigor in cross-cultural work; for anthropologists and linguists to satisfy a critical audience of psychologists may be especially difficult.

Contrasting with these challenging research parameters is the popular appeal of linguistic relativity. The lay public can be counted on to have an opinion on the topic (typically that language does affect patterns of thinking). This is scarcely surprising. To many non-linguists, it is self-evident that the purpose of language is to represent the world and that there are likely to be interesting variations in the ways in which languages do this. For example, bilingual speakers commonly report the subjective experience of “thinking differently” in their alternate languages. Unfortunately, it is perhaps impossible to evaluate precisely such statements.

In stark contrast to this common view, the modern fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics have been largely concerned with the purported universals of language. Further, most linguists scarcely concern themselves with semantics at all. The relatively few semanticists among them in turn typically eschew cross-linguistic comparison in favor of formalized descriptions relying critically on their own native speaker intuitions. The field of linguistics has long rewarded sophisticated theory development (most easily elaborated from work with better-known languages) far more than fieldwork-based description.

Semantics has long been one of the less empirical branches within linguistics. Linguistics has long provided excellent training for phonetics and structural analysis, but has a striking dearth of empirical methods for semantic description. So it is scarcely surprising that a typical descriptive grammar of a less-described language will give little attention to semantics. Semantic comparison across even moderately well-described languages largely relies on simple glossing conventions and dictionaries listing approximate translation equivalents. As a result, accurate cross-linguistic semantic descriptions are seldom available.

The first and most fundamental step in a linguistic relativity study must be to have an adequate description of the language categories of at least two appropriately distinct varieties of language. Failure to achieve this means that at best positive results will be open to multiple interpretations and at worst there will be no interpretable results at all from a failure to appropriately formulate a specific linguistic relativity hypothesis for testing. For instance, Loucks and Pederson (2014) argue that the lack of an adequate and appropriate linguistic description has precluded meaningful results in research on the categorization of motion events.

To create a linguistic description for linguistic relativity research, careful fieldwork with the languages must have been conducted. Existing semantic descriptions should generally be assumed inadequate or inaccurate. If one is interested in how habitual language patterns affect thought, then data about habitual language use must be collected rather than relying on grammatical treatises or dictionaries. For this, recordings of native speaker discussions concerning the domain in question should be collected and analyzed. Which aspects of what could be described are routinely selected for expression and which seem to be relatively ignored? Relying on extant recordings or transcripts is problematic. Since the goal is cross-linguistic comparison, it is best to rely on cross-linguistic data which derives from the same context repeated across speech communities. Early examples of such standardized cross-linguistic comparison can be found for child language in the “Frog story” paradigm ( Berman and Slobin 1994 ) and much of this research ultimately led to discussions of motion event cognition (see section 29.7 , below). For adult language the “Pear film” ( Chafe 1980 ) has been widely used for elicitation of narratives in many language communities all speaking about the same sequence of events. Pederson et al. (1998) describe a method for eliciting and comparing very specific spatial systems across languages with the intended purpose of developing subsequent cognitive testing. While not immediately connected with cognitive testing, Bohnemeyer et al. (2007) use a similar research technique for developing a typology of motion event descriptions.

29.4 Linguistic Relativity and Mainstream Linguistics

As linguistics and psychology joined forces in the cognitive sciences during the 1980s, there was a particular interest in determining what is universal to human cognition. Linguistics had already been greatly influenced by the “Chomskyan paradigm”, which sought to determine those native elements which are unique and necessary to any human language. Generally speaking, variation was theoretically interesting only insofar as it instantiated general universal principles. Over the years, the Chomskyan approach has been forced to reduce the number of features believed to be universal and unique to the human language faculty until the we reach the position in Hauser et al. (2002) . In this controversial view, the only known feature remaining to uniquely structured language is an ill-defined “recursion” or a rule’s ability to refer to itself iteratively. For a passionate argument against the dominance of universalist/nativist approaches to language categories, see Levinson (2003 a ) . For arguments specifically confronting Hauser et al. (2002) , see Jackendoff and Pinker (2005 b ) and Bickerton (2009) among others.

Consistent with this universalist paradigm was the faith that language processing was essentially modular. That is, the processes of language production and comprehension were assumed to be essentially neurologically (that is, architecturally) autonomous from other cognitive processes—with the necessary exception of the input to and output from the language module. Neuroimaging and brain damage research during this period was often cited as supporting this view that language processing is largely autonomous from other brain processes. Thus, in the absence of clear evidence supporting linguistic relativity, it was simple enough to dismiss language—especially those aspects of language which are variable across languages—as having little influence on the rest of brain functioning.

There are a number of problems with such a view, however. Perhaps the most troubling is that the lack of empirical evidence for linguistic relativity effects may well have been simply due to a limited number of studies which had investigated the topic. As for the purported modularity of language—an autonomy from other brain processes—the picture even today is far less clear than one might hope. For all of their wonder, neuroimaging studies are still notably crude tools relative to the sophistication of their subject. Further, while there is some neuroanatomy which does indeed seem most architecturally dedicated to language processes, it is associated with fairly automatic processing of structural relationships, e.g., the processing of simple morphology and syntax. At its core, linguistic relativity concerns itself with the conceptual categories of language, that is to say, with the influence of habitual semantic processing. In contrast to simple grammatical parsing, semantic processing seems to involve neurology scattered over many regions of the cortex. This renders a strictly modular account of semantic processing less plausible. 1 Accordingly, it appears impossible to rule out interesting interactions between language processing and other conceptual processing on the basis of what is currently known about the human brain.

Arguments against linguistic relativity generally only argue for a deficiency in a “pro” linguistic relativity argument. Any such successful defeat of a single linguistic relativity study entails only that there is no evidence in this specific instance of a linguistic relativity “effect”. One cannot generalize from a null result in one study to the conclusion that there can be no interesting effects in other linguistic and cognitive domains.

In other words, the irony of the “con” position is that linguistic relativity cannot be definitively disproven. One can always argue that the lack of results demonstrating a linguistic relativity hypothesis for a particular study should be taken as indicative that linguistic relativity effects would not be found elsewhere. However, such an argument remains largely an article of faith. Conversely, should a “pro” linguistic relativity study convince skeptics that an effect exists in a particular context and domain, it would be a similar article of faith to assume it exists elsewhere. Because of this, linguistic relativity researchers generally seek to find language effects in domains where skeptics would assume they would not be possible. To show an effect in a domain which is generally considered to be cross-culturally quite variable is less likely to impress than in an area in which cognitive universals have been presumed. Levinson and colleagues worked with spatial language and cognition for precisely this reason (see especially the discussion in Levinson (1996 a , 2003 b ) as spatial language and cognition had been assumed to be largely invariant across languages and cultures. Research demonstrating variation in such a domain would naturally lead to serious consideration of a potentially large interplay between language and cognition. See the discussion in section 29.7 below.

There has been a recent and overdue trend toward formulating more precise hypotheses about specific conceptual categories in contextualized usage and what possible effects one’s native language may have on the use and availability of these categories. Working with color terminology, Kay and Regier (2007) argue that a more complex model of the interactions between the cognitively universal and the linguistically specific must be developed. Similarly, Imai and Mazuka (2003) seek a more complex model for balancing the cognitively universal and language specificity in their work with the individuation of objects (as opposed to mass/substance). Arguably, the lack of such subtle models has been an obstacle to linguistic relativity research in the past. In other words, individual linguistic relativity studies should never expect to resolve such a uselessly broad question as “does language affect cognition”.

A partial list of the genuinely unresolved issues around linguistic relativity are:

What, if any, conceptual or processing domains are susceptible to the influence of linguistic categorization? Presumably, the more fundamental these domains are to cognition and the more their processes are shared with non-linguistic species, the less likely there might be an effect from linguistic categorization. However, is there a discernable boundary between those domains affected by language and those which are not?

What variation exists across languages, i.e., to what extent are languages locked into one way of expression vs. having alternative modes of expression? If there is little variation of a particular category in human language, then it is essentially impossible to decide whether that variation is due to innate cognitive constraints or some other universal guiding principle. It may be that certain language categories are an inevitable feature of a communication system with the complexity and constraints of human language without any need for a genetically predetermined mechanism. Conversely, the features of the studied languages which are said to vary across these languages are often poorly described. For instance, a language may be described as lacking a particular category, when it does in fact express that category but in a way which the researcher did not attend to. The controversy about whether Mandarin expresses conditional reasoning is one such example (cf. the brief discussion of the Bloom controversy below).

Further, what is the nature of linguistic expression needed for there to be a notable effect on non-linguistic cognition? Traditionally, linguistic relativity studies have focused on grammatically obligatory marking of conceptual categories. When a category is grammatically obligatory, it is taken to be more fundamental than when its expression is optional and less common. On the other hand, when a speaker does express such a category through a more circumlocutory means this certainly implies availability of the category. Pederson et al. (1998) addressed a purported language effect on cognition by constraining both the language and the cognitive task to a specific context. The relationship between language encoding in that context was taken to relate to cognitive processes involved in roughly the same context. What relationship other language uses might have to other cognitive tasks was unexplored.

Similarly, under what conditions do language categories affect non-linguistic cognition (whatever that may be) and when do they not affect cognition? Linguistic relativity studies need not assume that any effect of language categorization on cognition will be uniform and constant. Most narrowly, a study can only argue that an effect is found in the experimental setting used. It is unclear how far one can extrapolate from one experimental setting to a broader class of human behavior. Understandably, opponents of linguistic relativity studies will tend to dismiss any discovered effects as being task-specific while proponents will extrapolate as far as possible.

What is the mechanism of any interaction between language categories and the rest of cognition? For all the advances of cognitive psychology in the past decades, we still lack a detailed model of human cognitive processes. This makes it particularly challenging to formulate specific hypotheses about how one language’s categorization might influence other processes. Nonetheless, linguistic relativity studies can still look for behavioral evidence for some effect on non-linguistic processing—even if the exact nature of that process can only be speculative.

29.5 What Might a Language Effect Be

Should research demonstrate a correlation between a variable pattern of language and a corresponding variation in other cognitively driven behavior, there remain a couple of issues with the interpretation of results.

How do we infer from any correlation between a language pattern and a cognitively driven behavior that there is a particular direction of causation? Perhaps the cognitive systems vary across two different cultures for some reason other than language. This most likely would be because of a cultural difference driving the difference in both language use and cognitive patterns across the two cultures. Such an argument was presented in Li and Gleitman (2002) with a rebuttal in Levinson et al. (2002) . That language variation is simply a reflection of non-linguistic cultural variation seems initially a reasonable possibility. Certainly this is the case for recent adoption of lexical items expressing relatively new concepts, i.e., the cultural concern predates the linguistic pattern. On the other hand, if the linguistic pattern in question is represented by a long-fossilized grammatical construction, then it seems far more likely that the linguistic pattern predates any non-linguistic cultural pattern. Of course, since language is one of the major vehicles for transmitting culture across generations, it is not straightforward to distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic cultural patterns. For further discussion of linguistic relativity vis-à-vis culture, see Hanks (1990) , Bickel (2000) , and Enfield (2000) .

Another concern is that the experimental task seeking to measure a non-linguistic cognitive pattern might not in fact be a non-linguistic task because it is actually mediated by internal processing of language. Should this be the case, a relationship between language and non-linguistic cognition would not be demonstrated. While it is possible to block linguistic behavior during a task by having participants repeat nonsense syllables or engage in other language-masking behavior, this is usually considered too intrusive in a task of appreciable difficulty. The more consciously accessible the desired solution is to the participant, the more likely it is that the participant might choose to adopt a (conscious) strategy of relying on language to solve the task. On the other hand, Pederson (1995) argues that, if a participant selects to use language as the means for solving a task, the participant must understand the categories of that language to be appropriate and reflective of the cognitive categories appropriate to the task. If there were a disconnection between the categories of language and the cognitive categories which would otherwise be used, it is unclear what would sanction the reliance on language.

This last point relates to the often cited “thinking for speaking” notion presented in Slobin (1991) and taken up by many. This idea allows for a language effect on conceptualization for those representations which must be talked about. After all, if the grammar of a language requires encoding a certain type of information, that information should be encoded in the underlying representation when it is to be communicated. One possibility is that all information that any language might require to be encoded would be part of the representation of every speaker of every language. Only the elements required by a particular language would necessarily be brought into focus by speakers of that language, but the universal set of concepts is encoded prior to any linguistic coding. Since the superset of distinctions which any language might require is far greater than what any one language requires, it is clearly more efficient that speakers encode the information which they know will be needed for expression in their particular language and bother less with other information in the absence of other reasons to encode that information. In other words, for the purpose of speaking, speakers will encode events in memory differently depending on the communicative requirements of their languages.

This thinking-for-speaking model appeals as a compromise between heavy-handed linguistic determinism and complete universalism. Unfortunately, it is unclear exactly how such a model might work. If a speaker witnesses an event, will she encode to memory the information needed for retelling only when the event is suspected to be one she will want to communicate about later? This seems unlikely and unworkable. Any event might need to be described later, so conservatively the speaker should always encode the information to be communicated (or habitually invent it on retelling). This then becomes tantamount to speakers encoding information using language as their guide, which is essentially the premise of linguistic relativity and not a compromise position at all. In short, it is unclear how a model of cognition could be built with separate processes of thinking for speaking and thinking for not speaking.

29.6 Language Development

Related to linguistic relativity studies with adults is a growing body of research investigating cross-linguistic variation in child development. After all, if linguistic categorization helps to direct cognitive categorization, there must ultimately be a developmental account to explain this. One’s first language is notably learned during a period of remarkable conceptual development. In keeping with the universalist bias in psycholinguistics and with a shortage of first language development studies across a diverse set of languages, it was all to easy to assume that children learned language by mapping universal conceptual categories onto a fairly constant set of word meanings. There would certainly be little variation expected in the semantics of child language even if the adult languages seem to exhibit different patterns. The work of Bowerman, Brown, Choi, and others, e.g., Choi and Bowerman (1991) , Bowerman and Choi (2001) , Brown (2001) , and the collection Bowerman and Brown (2008) , have challenged these assumptions by arguing that the lexical meaning of children’s words are strongly influenced by the idiosyncrasies of the target language. Children’s lexical categories can vary dramatically cross-linguistically—suggesting that the process of language-specific category formation can begin early in development. Further, the target languages can differ substantially from one another in precisely the ways that make linguistic relativity questions interesting.

As Whorf is to linguistic relativity, so is Vygotsky (1986) to studies of linguistically mediated child development. In his model, the acquisition of the categories of language is assumed to be a primary vehicle for the development of a (deeper) understanding of these concepts. For example, de Villiers and de Villiers (2000 , 2003 ) credit the acquisition of complementation strategies of natural language as allowing the development of representations of the beliefs of others. Lucy and Gaskins (2001 , 2003 ) have investigated a correlation between Yucatecan and American behavior in a sorting task and the corresponding organization of lexical categories in Yucatec Mayan and English. Interestingly, and broadly consistent with Vygotsky, the acquisition of the language-specific lexical categories appears to precede by a few years the development of the corresponding sorting behavior. This sorting behavior is taken to reflect underlying preferences for conceptual categorization.

29.7 Domains of Research

As mentioned, linguistic relativity studies generally explore domains of language and cognition for which one might expect strong universal tendencies. Any such findings will naturally be most vigorously scrutinized and, should they survive such scrutiny, they will be all the more theoretically influential. Accordingly, most linguistic relativity research can be found in just a few cognitively fundamental domains. Even on the most charitable readings for the various linguistic relativity studies to date, some domains have clearly been more fruitful for purported language effects than others, though it is not always clear why this may be so.

Color has long been one of the battlegrounds for the linguistic relativity debate. On the one hand, languages clearly vary in their color terminology, suggesting that there may well be substantive differences in speakers’ organization of color categorizations. On the other hand, the reference of color terms nonetheless appear subject to some universal/perceptual constraints since, barring color blindness, people have essentially identical color perception prior to any higher-level cognitive processing of that information.

One of the first empirical linguistic relativity studies to be published compared English and Zuni color categorization ( Lenneberg and Roberts 1956 ). Kay and Kempton (1984) is also one of the more classic citations. As an apparent language effect occurred under one condition presentation of color stimuli, but not under a slightly different presentation, Kay and Kempton is frequently cited as support both for and against linguistic relativity effects. Some more recent work on color terms and linguistic relativity includes the substantial collection in Hardin and Maffi (1997) . Explicitly expanding the work of Kay and Kempton is the extensive work by Davies and colleagues ( Corbett and Davies 1997 ; Davies and Corbett 1997 ; Davies 1998 ; Davies et al. 1998 ; Oezgen and Davies 1998 ) which explores for demonstrable effects of color naming on color categorization tasks.

Space has also been assumed to be a domain with a strong universalist underpinning in cognition and in language. Since all humans interact with the same basic environmental properties, there seemed little reason to actually conduct cross-cultural and cross-linguistic investigations in this domain. Seizing on previously little reported, but globally widespread, variation in the linguistic expression of space, Levinson and colleagues have argued that fundamental differences in spatial reasoning and memory encoding co-vary with linguistic expression. Two well-known works in this area are Levinson (1996 a ) and Pederson et al. (1998) , which examine languages which habitually use different expressions of reference frames, that is, of the coordinate systems by which one locates objects relative to one another in space. They present spatial memory tasks demonstrating an underlying difference in the categories used to reconstruct spatial arrays from memory.

Unsurprisingly, these arguments have met with criticism from those believing that the human cognition of space must be fairly autonomous from general patterns of language. This skepticism tends to be strongest from those who have not worked with languages differing from the modern European norms. Li and Gleitman (2002) argued that spatial cognition is flexible and largely contextually driven rather than linguistically motivated. They modified the Levinson experiments by manipulating the physical environment of the experiment in a way that they claim demonstrates that the underlying frame of reference is determined by experimental context rather than habitual language encoding. However, the modifications Li and Gleitman made to the experiments are rejected as misleading in Levinson et al. (2002) . When the experiments were reconducted to the original specifications with Dutch participants (in Levinson et al. 2002 ) and with American-English speakers ( Church 2005 ), participants continued to behave in a way better predicted by linguistic pattern than the immediate testing environment. This debate is also continued in Majid (2002) and Majid et al. (2004) . Clearly linguistic relativity studies—both arguments for and against a language effect—need to carefully attend to the details of design. For an extensive summary of this work with spatial reference frames consult Levinson (2003 b ) .

In contrast to investigations into space, there has been little exploration in potential variation in temporal organization. This seems primarily due to three reasons. First, time is essentially one-dimensional, which is clearly simpler than multi-dimensional space, so the logical possibilities of variation are necessarily reduced. Second, at least linguistically, time is generally considered to be expressed in ways derivative of spatial expression (though see Tenbrink 2007 for a critique of this). If the categories of time are essentially derivative of space, then why not study space as the more fundamental domain? Third, and non-trivially, time is generally considered as abstract and metaphorical. While this suggests that variation of expression might be widespread, it also suggests that experiments may be quite challenging to design.

Capitalizing on the metaphorical nature of temporal expression in Mandarin and English, Boroditsky (2000 , 2001 ) argues that different patterns of linguistic expression drive different conceptualizations of time across the two languages. Note, however, that Chen (2007) and January and Kako (2007) fail to replicate her findings and suggest that the linguistic hypothesis itself may not have been adequate. This reinforces the point made above about the importance of careful linguistic description prior to hypothesis.

Combining space and time, we have motion events. Encoding motion events is one of the more fundamental tasks of natural language. Motion events are presumably perceptually universal, yet they are complex enough to suggest a range of conceptualizations should be possible. Talmy (1985) presented a typology of motion events in natural language suggesting that languages type according to one of two basic types in their expression of the path component of a motion event. Slobin and colleagues have used language production data from a variety of languages to argue that the type of language one uses has substantial consequences for how motion events will be represented; see Slobin (2000 , 2003 ) and Slobin et al. (2014) . A number of studies have tried to find cognitive correlations in wholly non-linguistic tasks with speakers of different language types with mixed results ( Naigles and Terrazas 1998 ; Papafragou et al. 2001 ; Finkbeiner et al. 2002 ; Oh 2003 ; Bohnemeyer et al. 2007 ). Loucks and Pederson (2014) argue that this is not so much because there is no language effect to be found in the conception of motion events but that the Talmy typology is insufficient for the purposes of generating a testable hypothesis. Since the processing of motion events is of such fundamental importance and languages do vary in their default representations of such events, we can expect linguistic relativity research to continue in this domain.

Various studies of European languages have observed that speakers (perhaps unsurprisingly) evaluate the references of nouns as having more masculine or feminine qualities based on their (cross-linguistically variable) grammatical gender assignment. For a brief summary of this research, see Boroditsky et al. (2003) . This research has not yet expanded to include the influences of nominal categorization across the broader and more varied range found in linguistic typology (see, for example, the collection in Craig 1986 ). It does seem that this could serve as an interesting domain for future linguistic relativity research.

Noun phrases also vary cross-linguistically as to their expression of plurality. Some languages mark dual as well as plural. Other languages only rarely explicitly mark plural and rely on context to imply a difference in number specification. As cited in the introduction, Lucy (1992 a ) examined grammatical number differences across Yucate-can Mayan and American English speakers and argued that this language difference played out in a difference in the memory encoding of numbers of objects in visual drawing.

Domains which are susceptible to the influence of formal training have been particularly controversial for linguistic relativity studies. Usually people’s abilities to use logic and number are viewed as stronger or weaker rather than as different but equal. This generally requires a hypothesis that one community is advantaged and another disadvantaged by their default linguistic code. Two areas in particular have received particular attention: counterfactual reasoning and arithmetic number.

Bloom (1981) proposed that Mandarin lacks an explicit counterfactual construction and that this leads to a greater challenge in counterfactual reasoning for Mandarin speakers than, for instance, for English speakers who do not lack such a construction. Subsequent studies have argued that while Mandarin may lack a dedicated counterfactual construction, it does have regular means of creating sentences which are clearly counterfactual in context. See the debate spread across Au (1983 , 1984 ), Bloom (1984) , Liu (1985) , and more recently Cara and Politzer (1993) . Further, Lardiere (1992) found that her sample of Arabic speakers patterned more like Bloom’s Mandarin speakers than like English speakers despite Arabic having a counterfactual construction. From this, she reasonably concludes that other cultural factors than language are at play.

Miura and colleagues ( Miura 1987 ; Miura et al. 1988 ; Miura and Okamoto 1989 ; Miura et al. 1993 ; Miura et al. 1994 ; Miura et al. 1999 ) have argued that speakers of Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages which have a consistent base-ten lexical set are advantaged in learning arithmetic over speakers of languages which have words like “eleven” and similar irregular numbers. It is particularly challenging to factor out family educational values and other cultural factors from such studies. Saxton and Towse (1998) also found that seemingly subtle changes in presentation could make the purported language effect disappear. They interpret this to suggest that any language effect about base-ten numbers is quite indirect.

Watson (1987) argued that the differing grammatical treatment of number in Yoruba disadvantaged monolingual Yoruba children in learning early arithmetic compared to their peers who are bilingual with English. Greiffenhagen and Sharrock (2007) provide a largely philosophical rebuttal against this work as part of a larger argument that linguistic relativity is scarcely an empirical enterprise.

Impressionistically, there is considerable variation in emotional responses and personality types across cultures. To date, the linguistic descriptions of emotion and personality terms have far too heavy a reliance on translation to allow for testable linguistic relativity hypotheses to be developed. It is nonetheless an area ripe for exploration as it is at least intuitively possible that the categories of emotion and personality expressed in language provide a template along which individuals may mold themselves. See, for example, Marmaridou (2006) for a linguistic description of Greek pain lexicalization.

Working within a single language, Lindquist et al. (2006) find priming and suppression effects in categorization of facial expression from the presentation of words denoting emotions. These findings at least raise the possibility that regular use of language-specific emotion terms may well influence speaker’s processing of emotions.

29.8 Summary

All of the research in linguistic relativity to date makes up only the smallest fraction of work within linguistics and the other cognitive sciences. In fact, given the general public interest in the topic, one could say that there has been an appallingly small amount of research. For many, linguistic relativity studies are readily dismissed as counter to current theoretical assumptions. That said, the relationship between the most uniquely human characteristics—linguistic communication and our astounding cognitive capacities—is clearly of profound interest. The last decade has shown a dramatic surge of academic interest in linguistic relativity, and the hypotheses generated and the methods employed to test these hypotheses have shown steady development. After approximately fifty years, the field of linguistic relativity studies may still be young but it shows every sign of developing into an exciting and robust field of research.

There are countless, largely technical accounts of what is known of the neurology of language processes. The conclusions and the technologies are continually being updated, so the best first source for readers interested in this topic would be a current textbook in psycholinguistics.

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LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY

Abstract The concept of linguistic relativity, first proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, proposes that the structure of a language affects the way a speaker thinks and perceives the world. This paper investigates the evidence for this hypothesis, including studies on the effects of language on cognition, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the notion of a strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. It concludes that linguistic relativity does exist, although its influence is limited and depends on the language in question.

Introduction Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is the idea that the structure of a language affects how its speakers think and perceive the world. This concept was first proposed by American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, and has since been widely discussed in both linguistics and psychology. This paper will discuss the evidence for linguistic relativity, including studies on the effects of language on cognition, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the notion of a strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Effects of Language on Cognition There is evidence that language can influence how people perceive the world. Studies have shown that language can affect how people think about time, color, and even the physical environment. For example, in a study by Boroditsky (2001), English and Spanish speakers were asked to compare two objects in terms of size. English speakers were more likely to use terms such as “bigger” and “smaller,” while Spanish speakers were more likely to use terms such as “more” and “less.” This suggests that the structure of a language can influence how people think about and perceive different concepts.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the structure of a language influences how its speakers think. This hypothesis is supported by evidence from studies showing that speakers of languages with different grammatical structures often think about the world differently. For example, speakers of English tend to think of time as a linear progression, while speakers of Mandarin Chinese view it as a cyclic event (Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002). This suggests that language can influence how people think about certain concepts.

Strong Version of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis The strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis states that the structure of a language can determine how people perceive the world. This is a controversial claim, and there is debate over whether it is true or not. However, there is evidence that language can influence how people think and perceive the world, which suggests that the strong version of the hypothesis may be correct.

Conclusion This paper has discussed the evidence for linguistic relativity, including studies on the effects of language on cognition, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the notion of a strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. It concludes that linguistic relativity does exist, although its influence is limited and depends on the language in question.

References Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2001.0748

Gentner, D., Imai, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2002). As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space-time metaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes, 17(5–6), 537–565. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960143000239

Related terms

Lasthcnic de ferjol syndrome, la belle indifference, lateral-line system, leader match, latent trait theory.