Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

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  Language, Culture, and Society

  An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

  • James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To modern anthropologists these statements are unacceptable in the forms in which they were made. But such quotations show the concern people historically have had about how language reflects the culture of the society it is spoken in, and the thought processes of those who speak it. In this chapter we will look at some of the relationships between language, thought, and culture, in particular, the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues, first, that the language one speaks determines how one perceives the world, and, second, that the distinctions encoded in each language are all different from one another. Thus, in its strong form this hypothesis claims that each society and culture lives in its own “linguistic world, ” perhaps incommensurate with the linguistic worlds of other societies and cultures. If true, this has profound philosophical, social, and even political implications.

  THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS: LINGUISTIC DETERMINISM AND LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY

  Whereas Boas’s and Sapir’s ideas concerning the relationship between language and culture primarily influenced only their students and other scholars, the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) caught the attention of the educated public. Whorf, a chemical engineer by training, was a fire-prevention inspector and later an executive in the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Connecticut. Although he continued to work for the company until his untimely death in 1941, he enrolled in a course at Yale University to do graduate work under Sapir, who had just been awarded a professorship at Yale. Among Whorf’s numerous subsequent publications, the best known are those in which he expounded on what some have referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see Box 12.1 ).

  The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Not So) in a Nutshell Expanding on Sapir’s ideas, Whorf wrote that

  the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas. … We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages … 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. … [Not] all observers are … led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar. (Whorf 1940a:231)

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  The Semantics of Chinese Classifiers and Linguistic Relativity

  • Song Jiang(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Although Whorf’s linguistic relativity principle had great impact in prompting studies of the ties between language and thought, no systematic and precise statement can be found in Whorf’s own writing which distinguishes exactly to what extent Whorf believed that language determines thought. Whorf’s notion is scattered among different writings across a broad range of topics and presented in an ambiguous and indistinct way (Lee, 1996, p. 85). The implicit implication and broad nature of Whorf’s statement have led to a considerable amount of interpretation about what he really meant.

  Interpretations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

  An influential interpretation of Whorf’s notion was given by Brown (1976) as a result of careful examination of Whorf’s work and a comprehensive review of major empirical studies conducted from the 1950s through the 1970s. According to Brown, Whorf appeared to put forward two hypotheses:

  • I: Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the two languages.
  • II: The structure of anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language. (Brown, 1976, p. 128)

  The first interpretation is often stated as the weak Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which advocates that language partially influences thought. The second interpretation is the strong Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic determinism, which holds that language determines thought (Fishman, 1960).

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  Language As Social Action

  Social Psychology and Language Use

  • Thomas M. Holtgraves(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is a rather narrow look at the language-thought relationship, and one that carries excess baggage. A broader approach to the problem can be articulated, as some researchers (e.g., Chiu, Krauss, & Lau, 1998; Hardin & Banaji, 1993; Hunt & Agnoli, 1991) have recently suggested. The basic idea is that language, and especially language use, can influence the manner in which people process information in specific situations, rather than determining in an absolute manner how people think in all situations. This idea has been demonstrated in several areas of research, three of which I review in this chapter: language use, implicit causality, and reasoning and pragmatics. In this way, many of the phenomena discussed in prior chapters—speech act production and recognition, politeness, impression management, perspective taking, and so on—may have additional social psychological consequences.

  EARLY TESTS OF THE WHORF-SAPIR HYPOTHESIS

  The idea that language affects thought is most closely associated with what has generally been referred to as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (which will be shortened here to the Whorfian hypothesis). Benjamin Whorf (1956) is generally given credit for articulating this view, though it is a (more extreme) view consistent with ideas espoused by Edward Sapir (1921) and others. Whorf was a very atypical contributor to the linguistics and anthropology literature. He was trained as a chemical engineer at Yale where he took classes from Sapir. He then spent his career (he died young, at age 44) as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. His ideas regarding language and thought were derived from his lifelong interest in, and study of, Native American languages and culture.

  It was Whorf’s contention that cognition is malleable and conditioned by language; our experience and representation of the world is a function of the language we speak. According to Whorf:

  We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe signify- cance 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. (1956; pp. 213–214)

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  Language Development

  • Erika Hoff(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Language, Culture, and Cognition in Development 247 Copyright 2013 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Language as Providing the Categories of Thought: The Whorfian Hypothesis The Whorfian hypothesis , which was introduced earlier in this chapter, is that language shapes thought. It is also known as linguistic determinism or — in a weaker form — linguistic relativity . This idea has roots in ancient philosophy (Slobin, 1974), but in modern social sci-ence, it is traced to the observations of linguistic anthropologists, in particular to the work of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf (see, e.g., Whorf, 1956). As was typical of American linguists in the first half of the 20th century, Sapir studied the languages of native American peoples. He found in his research languages that differed from English both in the way meanings were packaged into words and in the way meanings were encoded in the grammar. For example, in Navaho, the verb form you must use to ask someone to hand you something depends on the shape of the object you are asking for. One verb form is required if the object is long and flexible (such as string), another if it is long and rigid (such as a stick), and a third if it is flat and flexible (such as fabric) (Carroll & Casagrande, 1958, reported in Slobin, 1974). As another example, in the Hopi language, verb forms do not distinguish among the past, present, and future as English verb forms do, but Hopi verb forms distinguish whether the speaker is reporting what he is asserting or expecting what he is asserting.

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  Languages and Cultures

  Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Polomé

  • Mohammad Ali Jazayery, Werner Winter(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Sein leidenschaftlich vorgetragener Angriff hat jedoch nicht den kleinsten Stein aus ihm herauszubrechen vermocht, unsere Kenntnis an keiner Stelle bereichert — um diese Feststellung kommt man trotz der Gelehrsamkeit und des Scharfsinns, die er aufgeboten hat, leider nicht herum' (Tschirch 1966: 67). The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, it would seem, should put a rather abrupt end to any controversy centering in Erasmus Al-berus' characterization of Luther as linguae Germanicae parens 536 Irmengard Rauch (Keller 1978: 380). Although the premises contained in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (otherwise known as Linguistic Relativism or Relativity) are manifold, the basic or central proposition holds that 'the structure of a human being's language influences the manner in which he understands reality and behaves with respect to it' (Whorf 1956: 23). Relativism itself actually holds that human languages are relative in their structure since it claims there is no absolute universal structure; reality, it claims further, attests to endless diversity among languages. Sapir-Whorfian rel-ativity also incorporates the concept of Linguistic Determinism, which holds that language determines thought. This combination theory commonly admits of two degrees, a stronger version and a weaker version, the former maintaining that language deter-mines cognition and action, the latter maintaining that language merely influences cognition and action. Statements of Sapir (1931) asserting, for example, that 'Such categories as number, gender, case, tense, ... are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it because of the tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world' and of Whorf (1964: 36) proclaiming that 'linguistics is fundamental to the theory of thinking' are most frequently construed as representative of the strong version of Linguistic Relativity.

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  Sociolinguistics

  Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference, 1964

  • William Bright(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  One puzzle in the history of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has to do with Sapir's own apparent change of view as to the place of linguistic patterns. In the oft-quoted passage from The Status of Linguistics as a Science (1929) and in the brief abstract, Conceptual Categories in Primitive Languages, Sapir spoke in terms of the tyran-nical hold of linguistic form. Earlier, in his 1921 Language, he had made the Crocean remark quoted above, epitomizing language as expressive, a collective art; and he had distinguished the 'what' of thought from the 'how', taking the 'what', or latent content, of languages as the same, and treating the differences among languages as a matter 1 Astrov, Reichard and Landar have variously found the same selective emphasis. It is strange to find Hoijer's article footnoted as an example of untrammelled speculation (by Lounsbury, 1963: 570). Untrammelled speculation is hardly an apt characterization of any of Hoijer's work. TWO TYPES OF LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY 119 of 'how'. Such a view seems to separate linguistic form (of the sort attended to in Whorf's essays on Hopi, for example) from the content of thought, and hence, from world-view. The role of linguistic form in shaping thought would be at best a minor one, more like a choice between heroic couplets and blank verse than a choice of unconscious metaphysics. The pervasive emphasis on the functional autonomy of language, especially of grammar, in the 1921 Language (and in an earlier essay, 1912) are equally hard to articulate consistently with the later view of the tyrannical hold of linguistic form, which implies a tight integration between language and other aspects of life.

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  Language and Thought

  • Nick Lund(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  However, the LRH has become most closely associated with the work of Whorf (1956). He was another linguist LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT 10 The linguistic relativity hypothesis who studied Native American languages and he became convinced that the differences between languages determined the types of thought people were able to have. The theory is often referred to as the Sapir– Whorf hypothesis or, because of the greater influence of Whorf’s ideas, the Whorfian hypothesis . Psychologists have recognised that there are at least two versions of the LRH which differ in emphasis and implications. These two versions of the hypothesis have been labelled ‘strong’ and ‘weak’: • The ‘strong’ version is that language determines thought. • The ‘weak’ version is that language influences thought. Thus the strong version suggests that the language we speak determines the nature of our thoughts, including the types of ideas and concepts we are able to have. It proposes that thoughts that are possible in one language may not be possible in another. The weak version, on the other hand, suggests that language has a more subtle effect on thought and merely influences what we are likely to perceive or remember about an object or event. If you have a word for something in your language you are more likely to recognise and remember it than someone who uses a language that does not have a word for it. More recently Hunt and Agnoli (1991) have suggested an alterna-tive form of the LRH. This is a cognitive approach to the relationship between language and thought which focuses on the computational costs that different languages impose on thinking. In other words, the language you speak makes it easier, and therefore more likely, to think in one way or another. The three versions are discussed below, but before exploring the evidence in detail it should be acknowledged that any version of the hypothesis is difficult to test.

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  The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival

  Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity

  • Joshua A. Fishman, Michael H. Gertner, Esther G. Lowy, William G. Milán, Silvia Burunat, David E. Fishman, Ofelia García, Itzek Gottesman, Phyllis Koling, Rena Mayerfeld, Carole Riedler-Berger, Mark J. Steele(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 14 The Whorfian Hypothesis: Varieties of Valuation, Confirmation and Disconfirmation JOSHUA A. FISHMAN In the mid 1930s, an American anthropological linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), kindled widespread academic interest in a hypothesis that is in reality a very ancient one insofar as the history of ideas within the Euro-Mediterranean world is concerned. This hypothesis claims that the vastly differently structured languages of mankind lead their respective speakers to vastly different views and experiences of reality, of nature, of life itself. Although this hypothesis had been of interest as far back as Herodotus (who suspected that Egyptian behavior was often opposite to Greek behavior because Egyptians wrote from right to left whereas Greeks [by then] wrote from left to right ), and although it became a theme in such modern European intellectual and literary movements as romanticism, nationalism, the rise of modern anthro-pology and the birth of modern social psychology, it was Whorf who was interpreted by many as having restated it in ways that made it intellectually exciting and, above all, testable for modern American linguists, anthropol-ogists, psychologists, general semanticists and others concerned with the cen-trality of language in human affairs. Indeed, thanks to Whorf, who may actually have been stressing other things (Fishman, Chapter 15, This Volume), this hypothesis has achieved the status of a legend of mankind, i.e., the status of a view that provides insights into the history of ideas more generally and that continues to be stimulating above and beyond its confirmability, above and beyond science, above and beyond empiricism and even rationality per se. No wonder then that the sociology of language, too, has had to face this hypothesis and ponder its meaning and its validity. Let us temporarily set aside the question of whether or not Whorf really intended to say what so many have so long interpreted him as having said.

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  Basic concepts, theories and problems: alternative approaches

  • Joshua A. Fishman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  That the societies using these very different languages differ one from the other in many ways is obvious to all. Is it not possible, therefore, that these socio-cultural differences - including ways of reasoning, perceiving, learning, distinguishing, remembering, etc. - are directly relatable to the structured differences between the languages themselves? The Whorfian hypothesis claims that this is indeed the case (Fishman 1960). Intriguing though this claim may be it is necessary to admit that many years of intensive research have not succeeded in demonstrating is to be tenable. Although many have tried to do so no one has successfully predicted and demonstrated a cognitive difference between two populations on the basis of the grammatical or other structural differences between their languages alone. Speakers of tone languages and of vowel length languages and of many-voweled languages do not seem to hear better than do speakers of languages that lack all of these features. Speakers of languages that code for color, shape and size in the very verb form itself do not tend to categorize or classify a random set of items much differently than do speakers of languages whose verbs merely encode tense, person and number (Carroll and Casagrande 1958). Whorf's claims (namely, that ... the background linguistic system [in other words, the grammar] of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but it is part of a particular grammar and differs, from slightly to greatly, between grammars 1940) seem to be overstated and no one-to-one correspondence between grammatical structure and either cognitive or socio-cultural structure

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  Semiotic Mediation

  Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives

  • Elizabeth Mertz(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought. (Sapir 1924:155) This relativity of the form of thought arises, then, because speakers accept their linguistic categories (formally systematized abstractions from experience) as guides in the interpretation of experience, even though thbse categories are highly variable across languages. Whorf, following Sapir, felt that language classifications influenced thought and, therefore, that the diversity of those classifications insured a certain di-versity of thought among speakers of different languages: 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. (Whorf 1956a:221) Unlike Sapir, however, Whorf took up in some detail just how speakers are pointed by their grammars. His central treatment of the problem is given in his paper The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language 82 John A. Lucy (1956a: 134-159) which serves as the principal basis for the following discus-sion. 4 Whorf began by laying out the scope of his research project: That portion of the whole investigation here to be reported may be summed up in two questions: (1) Are our own concepts of 'time,' 'space/ and 'matter* given in sub-stantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages? (2) Are there traceable affinities between (a) cul-tural and behavioral norms and (b) large-scale linguistic patterns? (1956a: 138) Embedded within this statement are clear indications of the aspects of language and thought that were of concern to Whorf in his study.

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  Language and Thought

  • Nick Lund(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  He concluded that the differences between the languages changed the way people perceive their environments. However, the LRH has become most closely associated with the work of Whorf (1956). He was another linguist who studied Native American languages and he became convinced that the differences between languages determined the types of thought people were able to have. The theory is often referred to as the Sapir– Whorf hypothesis or, because of the greater influence of Whorf’s ideas, the Whorfian hypothesis. Psychologists have recognised that there are at least two versions of the LRH which differ in emphasis and implications. These two versions of the hypothesis have been labelled ‘strong’ and ‘weak’: Thus the strong version suggests that the language we speak determines the nature of our thoughts, including the types of ideas and concepts we are able to have. It proposes that thoughts that are possible in one language may not be possible in another. The weak version, on the other hand, suggests that language has a more subtle effect on thought and merely influences what we are likely to perceive or remember about an object or event. If you have a word for something in your language you are more likely to recognise and remember it than someone who uses a language that does not have a word for it. The ‘strong’ version is that language determines thought. The ‘weak’ version is that language influences thought. More recently Hunt and Agnoli (1991) have suggested an alternative form of the LRH. This is a cognitive approach to the relationship between language and thought which focuses on the computational costs that different languages impose on thinking. In other words, the language you speak makes it easier, and therefore more likely, to think in one way or another. The three versions are discussed below, but before exploring the evidence in detail it should be acknowledged that any version of the hypothesis is difficult to test

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  The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought

  Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman's Sixty-Fifth Birthday

  • Robert L. Cooper, Bernard J. Spolsky, Robert L. Cooper, Bernard J. Spolsky(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  It stands to reason that in some tasks the external stimulus may be so clear and unequivocal that it overrides any effect of linguistic structure, whereas in other tasks an influence of language on cognition may turn up in further research. 6. Is Whorfianism on the wane? If linguistic relativism indeed no longer casts its spell on the scientific community, as statements like those by Lakoff (1987: 304; see Section 1) and Brown (1986) imply, we ought to examine the reasons for this change of heart (at least on the part of psychologists; anthropologists seem to be as happy with linguistic relati-vism as ever; see Fishman 1982). Particularly so, since the verdict of research findings has been anything but unfavorable. Nor has there been any sign of the steady output of findings relevant to Whorfian theory diminishing. Why, then, this increasing skepticism in regard to Whorf's ideas? 30 I. M. Schlesinger 6.1. Reasons for disillusionment The current disillusionment with Whorfianism seems to be due not to the absence of research findings supporting his theory, but, in part, to the triviality of these findings. Whorf made far-reaching claims about the pervasive effects of language on the mental life of a people, and all that experimental psychologists managed to come up with were such modest results as the effect of the vocabulary of a lan-guage on the discriminability of color chips. Experimental Psychology can be counted on to produce just such results - call them modest or trivial, if you will -but the fact that Whorf's grandiose claims were thus whittled down apparently has had a sobering effect. The only attempt at testing a prediction of seemingly greater import was that of Bloom (1981), who found that speakers of Chinese were less inclined to reason with counter-factual implications and to understand such reasoning. Bloom ac-counts for this finding by the lack of a corresponding construction in Chinese.

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