In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (SWH) (also known as the "linguistic relativity hypothesis") postulates a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, it was an underlying axiom of linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.
The hypothesis postulates that a particular language's nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers: that different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community. The hypothesis emerges in strong and weak formulations.
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The position that language anchors thought was first advanced in detail by several German thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Early versions appear in the work of two students of Immanuel Kant, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder; a well-known early defense of the doctrine appears in Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium ("On the comparative study of languages") published in 1836.[1]
This notion has been largely assimilated into Western thought. Karl Kerenyi began his 1976 English language translation of Dionysos with this passage:
The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages are not so much a means of expressing truth that has already been established, but are a means of discovering truth that was previously unknown. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways of looking at the world.[2]
The origin of the SWH as a more rigorous examination of this familiar cultural perception may be traced to the work of Franz Boas, often credited as the founder of anthropology in the United States. Boas was educated in Germany in the late 19th Century, when scientists such as Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann were attempting to understand the physiology of sensation.
One marked philosophical current was a revival of interest in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant opined that knowledge is the result of concrete cognitive work on the part of an individual person—reality ("sensuous intuition") is inherently in flux, and understanding results when someone takes that intuition and interprets it via their "categories of the understanding." Different individuals may thus perceive the same noumenal reality as phenomenal instances of their different, individual concepts.
In the United States, Boas encountered Native American languages from many different linguistic families, all of which were quite different from the standard Semitic and Indo-European languages than studied by most European scholars. Boas realized how greatly ways of life and grammatical categories may vary from locality to locality. As a result he came to hold that the culture and lifeways of a people are reflected in their language.
Sapir was one of Boas's star students. He furthered Boas's argument by noting that languages are systematic, formally complete, systems. Thus, it is not this nor that particular word that expresses a particular mode of thought and behavior, but the coherent and systematic nature of language interacting at a wider level with thought and behavior. While his views changed over time, towards the end of his life Sapir held that language does not merely mirror culture and habitual action, but that language and thought are in a relationship of mutual influence, verging upon determinism.
Whorf refined this idea and engendered precision by examining the particular grammatical mechanisms by which language influences thought. He framed his discursive thrust thus:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.[3]
Despite criticism of his hypothesis as monocausal and deterministic, Whorf insisted that thought and action were linguistically and socially mediated, and not monolithically determined. In doing so he opposed what he called a "natural logic" position which held, according to him, that "talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to 'express' what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically".[4] On this account, he argued, "thought does not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe".[5]
Whorf's analysis of the differences between English and (in one famous instance) the Hopi language raised the bar for an analysis of the relationship between language, thought, and reality by relying on close analysis of grammatical structure, rather than a more impressionistic account of the differences between, say, vocabulary items in a language. For example, "Standard Average European" (SAE)—i.e., Western languages in general—tends to analyse reality as objects in space: the present and future are thought of as "places", and time is a path linking them. A phrase like "three days" is grammatically equivalent to "three apples", or "three kilometres". Other languages, including many Native American languages, are oriented towards process. To monolingual speakers of such languages, the concrete/spatial metaphors of SAE grammar may make little sense. Whorf himself claimed that his work on the SWH was inspired by his belief that a Hopi speaker would find relativistic physics fundamentally easier to grasp than an SAE speaker would.
As a result of his status as a student and not as a professional linguist, Whorf's work on linguistic relativity, conducted largely in the late 1930s, did not become popular until the posthumous publication of his writings in the 1950s. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis influenced the development and standardization of Interlingua during the first half of the 20th Century, but this was largely due to Sapir's direct involvement. In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown created the Loglan constructed language (Lojban, a reformed variant of Loglan, still exists as a living language) in order to test the hypothesis. However, no such experiment was ever conducted.
Linguistic theories of the 1960s—such as those proposed by Noam Chomsky—focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result Whorf's work fell out of favor. An example of a recent Chomskian approach to this issue is Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct. Pinker argues from a contravening school of thought which holds that a universal grammar underlies all language. The most extreme proponents of this theory, such as Pinker, argue that thought is independent of language, and that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, called "mentalese." Pinker, calling it "Whorf's radical position," vehemently denies that language contains any thought or culture, declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make." (1994, p. 60)
Representing a more Whorfian approach, George Lakoff has argued that much of language is essentially metaphor.[6] For instance, English employs many metaphorical tropes that equate time with money, e.g.:
Whorf might interpret that this usage affects the way English speakers conceive the noumenon "time." For another example, political arguments are shaped by the web of conceptual metaphors that underlie language use. In political debates, it greatly matters whether one is arguing in favor of the "right to life" or against the "right to choose"; whether one is discussing "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers".[7]
In the late 1980s and early 1990s advances in cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Today researchers disagree—often intensely—about how strongly language influences thought. However, this disagreement has sparked increasing interest in the issue and a great deal of innovative and important research.
The most extreme opposing position—that language has absolutely no influence on thought—is widely considered to be false (Gumperz: introduction to Gumperz 1996). But the strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language determines thought, is also thought to be incorrect. Whorf himself never held this strong version; it is more of a theoretical construct employed as a foil. The most common view is that the truth lies somewhere in between the two. Current linguists, rather than studying whether language affects thought, are studying how it affects thought. Earlier, the bulk of the research was concentrated on supporting or disproving the hypothesis; the experimental data have not been able to disprove it. (Lucy 1992; Gumperz & Levinson 1996)
Investigation into the recall of linguistic entities confirms that the brain stores associations between semantic concepts (like the idea of a house) and phonetic representation (the sounds that make up the word "house"). The initial sounds are more important for recall purposes than later sounds. Relationships between semantic concepts are also stored, but indirect relationships between unrelated concepts can be inadvertently triggered by a "bridge" through a phonetic relationship. For example, the recall of the idea of a house can be sped up by exposure to the word "Home" because they have the same initial sound.
Among the most frequently cited examples of "linguistic determinism" is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people, who were thought to have numerous words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Eskimo, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax", he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf and suggesting the triviality of Whorf's observations.[8]
Numerous studies in color perception across various cultures have resulted in differing viewpoints.[9] A recent study by Peter Gordon examines the language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil. According to Gordon, the language used by this tribe only contains three counting words: one, two and many and points out that even the words for one and two are not always used for those quantities. Gordon shows through a series of experiments that the people of the Pirahã tribe have difficulty remembering displays of objects when quantities are higher than about three (Gordon, 2004). However, the causal relationship of these events is not clear. Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. On the other hand, such criticisms represent a simple-minded application of cause and effect and ignores the fact that numbers are encoded in words. A more systemic model of the interactions between culture, language and cognition would be more accurate. A recent study with the Munduruku tribe, who have only 5 words for numbers, shows that they have a basic understanding of geometry, which the authors suggest represents a form of protonumeric cognition. But since geometry does not require words for numbers, the relevance of these studies to the Whorfian debate is marginal. [10]
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached ... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69)
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees. (Whorf, 1940, pp. 213–14)
Kenneth E. Iverson, the originator of the APL programming language, believed that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages (without actually mentioning the hypothesis by name). His Turing award lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms.[13] The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes, such as a conceptual hierarchy of computer languages, with more expressive and succinct languages at the top.