29. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
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This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.
29. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
[--markrose]
According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language determines the
categories and much of the content of thought. "We dissect nature along
lines laid down by our native languages... We cannot talk at all except by
subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the
[speech community] decrees," said Whorf, in LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND REALITY
(1956). "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," said
Sapir.
Both were students of Amerindian languages, and were drawn to this
conclusion by analysis of the grammatical categories and semantic
distinctions found in these languages, fascinatingly different from those
found in European ones. (Neither linguist used the term 'Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis', however; Whorf referred to the 'linguistic relativity
principle'. Moreover, the principle was almost entirely elaborated by
Whorf alone.)
The idea enjoyed a certain vogue in the mid-20th century, not only among linguists but
among anthropologists, psychologists, and science fiction writers.
However, the strong form of the hypothesis is not now widely believed. The
conceptual systems of one language, after all, can be explained and
understood by speakers of another. And grammatical categories do not
really explain cultural systems very well. Indo-European languages make
gender a grammatical category, and their speakers may be sexist-- but
speakers of Turkish or Chinese, languages without grammatical gender, are
not notably less sexist.
Whorf's analysis of what he called "Standard Average European" languages
is also questionable. E.g. he claims that "the three-tense system of SAE
verbs colors all our thinking about time." Only English doesn't have three
tenses; it has two, past and present; future events are expressed by the
present ("I see him tomorrow"), or by a modal expression, merely one of a
large class of such synthetic expressions. And for that matter, English
distinguishes more like six than three times ("I had gone, I went, I just
arrived, I'm going, I'm about to go, I'll go").
To prove his point, Whorf collected stories of confusions brought about by
language. For instance, a man threw a spent match into what looked like a
pool of water; only there was decomposing waste in the water, and escaping
gas was ignited by the spark-- boom! But it's not clear that any
*linguistic* act is involved here. The man could think the pool looked
like water without thinking of the word 'water'; and he could fail to
notice the flammable vapors without doing any thinking at all.
A weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-- that language influences
without determining our categories of thought-- still seems reasonable,
and is even backed up by some psychological experiments-- e.g. Kay &
Kempton's finding that, in distinguishing color triads, a pair
distinguished by color names can seem more distinct than a pair with the
'same' name which are actually more divergent optically (American
Anthropologist, March 1984).
It should be emphasized that, in their willingness to consider the idea
that non-Western people have languages and worldviews that match the
European's in precision and elegance, Sapir and Whorf were far ahead of
their time.
For a spirited and very readable defense of Whorf, see Suzette Haden
Elgin's THE LANGUAGE IMPERATIVE (2000).
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