weak sapir whorf hypothesis

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis)

Mia Belle Frothingham

Author, Researcher, Science Communicator

BA with minors in Psychology and Biology, MRes University of Edinburgh

Mia Belle Frothingham is a Harvard University graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Sciences with minors in biology and psychology

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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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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Supplement to Philosophy of Linguistics

Whorfianism.

Emergentists tend to follow Edward Sapir in taking an interest in interlinguistic and intralinguistic variation. Linguistic anthropologists have explicitly taken up the task of defending a famous claim associated with Sapir that connects linguistic variation to differences in thinking and cognition more generally. The claim is very often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (though this is a largely infelicitous label, as we shall see).

This topic is closely related to various forms of relativism—epistemological, ontological, conceptual, and moral—and its general outlines are discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia; see the section on language in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism (§3.1). Cultural versions of moral relativism suggest that, given how much cultures differ, what is moral for you might depend on the culture you were brought up in. A somewhat analogous view would suggest that, given how much language structures differ, what is thinkable for you might depend on the language you use. (This is actually a kind of conceptual relativism, but it is generally called linguistic relativism, and we will continue that practice.)

Even a brief skim of the vast literature on the topic is not remotely plausible in this article; and the primary literature is in any case more often polemical than enlightening. It certainly holds no general answer to what science has discovered about the influences of language on thought. Here we offer just a limited discussion of the alleged hypothesis and the rhetoric used in discussing it, the vapid and not so vapid forms it takes, and the prospects for actually devising testable scientific hypotheses about the influence of language on thought.

Whorf himself did not offer a hypothesis. He presented his “new principle of linguistic relativity” (Whorf 1956: 214) as a fact discovered by linguistic analysis:

When linguists became able to examine critically and scientifically a large number of languages of widely different patterns, their base of reference was expanded; they experienced an interruption of phenomena hitherto held universal, and a whole new order of significances came into their ken. It was found 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 is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. 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 1956: 212–214; emphasis in original)

Later, Whorf’s speculations about the “sensuously and operationally different” character of different snow types for “an Eskimo” (Whorf 1956: 216) developed into a familiar journalistic meme about the Inuit having dozens or scores or hundreds of words for snow; but few who repeat that urban legend recall Whorf’s emphasis on its being grammar, rather than lexicon, that cuts up and organizes nature for us.

In an article written in 1937, posthumously published in an academic journal (Whorf 1956: 87–101), Whorf clarifies what is most important about the effects of language on thought and world-view. He distinguishes ‘phenotypes’, which are overt grammatical categories typically indicated by morphemic markers, from what he called ‘cryptotypes’, which are covert grammatical categories, marked only implicitly by distributional patterns in a language that are not immediately apparent. In English, the past tense would be an example of a phenotype (it is marked by the - ed suffix in all regular verbs). Gender in personal names and common nouns would be an example of a cryptotype, not systematically marked by anything. In a cryptotype, “class membership of the word is not apparent until there is a question of using it or referring to it in one of these special types of sentence, and then we find that this word belongs to a class requiring some sort of distinctive treatment, which may even be the negative treatment of excluding that type of sentence” (p. 89).

Whorf’s point is the familiar one that linguistic structure is comprised, in part, of distributional patterns in language use that are not explicitly marked. What follows from this, according to Whorf, is not that the existing lexemes in a language (like its words for snow) comprise covert linguistic structure, but that patterns shared by word classes constitute linguistic structure. In ‘Language, mind, and reality’ (1942; published posthumously in Theosophist , a magazine published in India for the followers of the 19th-century spiritualist Helena Blavatsky) he wrote:

Because of the systematic, configurative nature of higher mind, the “patternment” aspect of language always overrides and controls the “lexation”…or name-giving aspect. Hence the meanings of specific words are less important than we fondly fancy. Sentences, not words, are the essence of speech, just as equations and functions, and not bare numbers, are the real meat of mathematics. We are all mistaken in our common belief that any word has an “exact meaning.” We have seen that the higher mind deals in symbols that have no fixed reference to anything, but are like blank checks, to be filled in as required, that stand for “any value” of a given variable, like …the x , y , z of algebra. (Whorf 1942: 258)

Whorf apparently thought that only personal and proper names have an exact meaning or reference (Whorf 1956: 259).

For Whorf, it was an unquestionable fact that language influences thought to some degree:

Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language—shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language—in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. [footnote omitted] And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness. (Whorf 1956: 252)

He seems to regard it as necessarily true that language affects thought, given

• the fact that language must be used in order to think, and
• the facts about language structure that linguistic analysis discovers.

He also seems to presume that the only structure and logic that thought has is grammatical structure. These views are not the ones that after Whorf’s death came to be known as ‘the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ (a sobriquet due to Hoijer 1954). Nor are they what was called the ‘Whorf thesis’ by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) which was concerned with the relation of obligatory lexical distinctions and thought. Brown and Lenneberg (1954) investigated this question by looking at the relation of color terminology in a language and the classificatory abilities of the speakers of that language. The issue of the relation between obligatory lexical distinctions and thought is at the heart of what is now called ‘the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘the Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘Whorfianism’.

1. Banal Whorfianism

No one is going to be impressed with a claim that some aspect of your language may affect how you think in some way or other; that is neither a philosophical thesis nor a psychological hypothesis. So it is appropriate to set aside entirely the kind of so-called hypotheses that Steven Pinker presents in The Stuff of Thought (2007: 126–128) as “five banal versions of the Whorfian hypothesis”:

• “Language affects thought because we get much of our knowledge through reading and conversation.”
• “A sentence can frame an event, affecting the way people construe it.”
• “The stock of words in a language reflects the kinds of things its speakers deal with in their lives and hence think about.”
• “[I]f one uses the word language in a loose way to refer to meanings,… then language is thought.”
• “When people think about an entity, among the many attributes they can think about is its name.”

These are just truisms, unrelated to any serious issue about linguistic relativism.

We should also set aside some methodological versions of linguistic relativism discussed in anthropology. It may be excellent advice to a budding anthropologist to be aware of linguistic diversity, and to be on the lookout for ways in which your language may affect your judgment of other cultures; but such advice does not constitute a hypothesis.

2. The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The term “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” was coined by Harry Hoijer in his contribution (Hoijer 1954) to a conference on the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1953. But anyone looking in Hoijer’s paper for a clear statement of the hypothesis will look in vain. Curiously, despite his stated intent “to review and clarify the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (1954: 93), Hoijer did not even attempt to state it. The closest he came was this:

The central idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly, as a way of defining experience for its speakers.

The claim that “language functions…as a way of defining experience” appears to be offered as a kind of vague metaphysical insight rather than either a statement of linguistic relativism or a testable hypothesis.

And if Hoijer seriously meant that what qualitative experiences a speaker can have are constituted by that speaker’s language, then surely the claim is false. There is no reason to doubt that non-linguistic sentient creatures like cats can experience (for example) pain or heat or hunger, so having a language is not a necessary condition for having experiences. And it is surely not sufficient either: a robot with a sophisticated natural language processing capacity could be designed without the capacity for conscious experience.

In short, it is a mystery what Hoijer meant by his “central idea”.

Vague remarks of the same loosely metaphysical sort have continued to be a feature of the literature down to the present. The statements made in some recent papers, even in respected refereed journals, contain non-sequiturs echoing some of the remarks of Sapir, Whorf, and Hoijer. And they come from both sides of the debate.

3. Anti-Whorfian rhetoric

Lila Gleitman is an Essentialist on the other side of the contemporary debate: she is against linguistic relativism, and against the broadly Whorfian work of Stephen Levinson’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In the context of criticizing a particular research design, Li and Gleitman (2002) quote Whorf’s claim that “language is the factor that limits free plasticity and rigidifies channels of development”. But in the claim cited, Whorf seems to be talking about the psychological topic that holds universally of human conceptual development, not claiming that linguistic relativism is true.

Li and Gleitman then claim (p. 266) that such (Whorfian) views “have diminished considerably in academic favor” in part because of “the universalist position of Chomskian linguistics, with its potential for explaining the striking similarity of language learning in children all over the world.” But there is no clear conflict or even a conceptual connection between Whorf’s views about language placing limits on developmental plasticity, and Chomsky’s thesis of an innate universal architecture for syntax. In short, there is no reason why Chomsky’s I-languages could not be innately constrained, but (once acquired) cognitively and developmentally constraining.

For example, the supposedly deep linguistic universal of ‘recursion’ (Hauser et al. 2002) is surely quite independent of whether the inventory of colour-name lexemes in your language influences the speed with which you can discriminate between color chips. And conversely, universal tendencies in color naming across languages (Kay and Regier 2006) do not show that color-naming differences among languages are without effect on categorical perception (Thierry et al. 2009).

4. Strong and weak Whorfianism

One of the first linguists to defend a general form of universalism against linguistic relativism, thus presupposing that they conflict, was Julia Penn (1972). She was also an early popularizer of the distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ formulations of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (and an opponent of the ‘strong’ version).

‘Weak’ versions of Whorfianism state that language influences or defeasibly shapes thought. ‘Strong’ versions state that language determines thought, or fixes it in some way. The weak versions are commonly dismissed as banal (because of course there must be some influence), and the stronger versions as implausible.

The weak versions are considered banal because they are not adequately formulated as testable hypotheses that could conflict with relevant evidence about language and thought.

Why would the strong versions be thought implausible? For a language to make us think in a particular way, it might seem that it must at least temporarily prevent us from thinking in other ways, and thus make some thoughts not only inexpressible but unthinkable. If this were true, then strong Whorfianism would conflict with the Katzian effability claim. There would be thoughts that a person couldn’t think because of the language(s) they speak.

Some are fascinated by the idea that there are inaccessible thoughts; and the notion that learning a new language gives access to entirely new thoughts and concepts seems to be a staple of popular writing about the virtues of learning languages. But many scientists and philosophers intuitively rebel against violations of effability: thinking about concepts that no one has yet named is part of their job description.

The resolution lies in seeing that the language could affect certain aspects of our cognitive functioning without making certain thoughts unthinkable for us .

For example, Greek has separate terms for what we call light blue and dark blue, and no word meaning what ‘blue’ means in English: Greek forces a choice on this distinction. Experiments have shown (Thierry et al. 2009) that native speakers of Greek react faster when categorizing light blue and dark blue color chips—apparently a genuine effect of language on thought. But that does not make English speakers blind to the distinction, or imply that Greek speakers cannot grasp the idea of a hue falling somewhere between green and violet in the spectrum.

There is no general or global ineffability problem. There is, though, a peculiar aspect of strong Whorfian claims, giving them a local analog of ineffability: the content of such a claim cannot be expressed in any language it is true of . This does not make the claims self-undermining (as with the standard objections to relativism); it doesn’t even mean that they are untestable. They are somewhat anomalous, but nothing follows concerning the speakers of the language in question (except that they cannot state the hypothesis using the basic vocabulary and grammar that they ordinarily use).

If there were a true hypothesis about the limits that basic English vocabulary and constructions puts on what English speakers can think, the hypothesis would turn out to be inexpressible in English, using basic vocabulary and the usual repertoire of constructions. That might mean it would be hard for us to discuss it in an article in English unless we used terminological innovations or syntactic workarounds. But that doesn’t imply anything about English speakers’ ability to grasp concepts, or to develop new ways of expressing them by coining new words or elaborated syntax.

5. Constructing and evaluating Whorfian hypotheses

A number of considerations are relevant to formulating, testing, and evaluating Whorfian hypotheses.

Genuine hypotheses about the effects of language on thought will always have a duality: there will be a linguistic part and a non-linguistic one. The linguistic part will involve a claim that some feature is present in one language but absent in another.

Whorf himself saw that it was only obligatory features of languages that established “mental patterns” or “habitual thought” (Whorf 1956: 139), since if it were optional then the speaker could optionally do it one way or do it the other way. And so this would not be a case of “constraining the conceptual structure”. So we will likewise restrict our attention to obligatory features here.

Examples of relevant obligatory features would include lexical distinctions like the light vs. dark blue forced choice in Greek, or the forced choice between “in (fitting tightly)” vs. “in (fitting loosely)” in Korean. They also include grammatical distinctions like the forced choice in Spanish 2nd-person pronouns between informal/intimate and formal/distant (informal tú vs. formal usted in the singular; informal vosotros vs. formal ustedes in the plural), or the forced choice in Tamil 1st-person plural pronouns between inclusive (“we = me and you and perhaps others”) and exclusive (“we = me and others not including you”).

The non-linguistic part of a Whorfian hypothesis will contrast the psychological effects that habitually using the two languages has on their speakers. For example, one might conjecture that the habitual use of Spanish induces its speakers to be sensitive to the formal and informal character of the speaker’s relationship with their interlocutor while habitually using English does not.

So testing Whorfian hypotheses requires testing two independent hypotheses with the appropriate kinds of data. In consequence, evaluating them requires the expertise of both linguistics and psychology, and is a multidisciplinary enterprise. Clearly, the linguistic hypothesis may hold up where the psychological hypothesis does not, or conversely.

In addition, if linguists discovered that some linguistic feature was optional in two different languages, then even if psychological experiments showed differences between the two populations of speakers, this would not show linguistic determination or influence. The cognitive differences might depend on (say) cultural differences.

A further important consideration concerns the strength of the inducement relationship that a Whorfian hypothesis posits between a speaker’s language and their non-linguistic capacities. The claim that your language shapes or influences your cognition is quite different from the claim that your language makes certain kinds of cognition impossible (or obligatory) for you. The strength of any Whorfian hypothesis will vary depending on the kind of relationship being claimed, and the ease of revisability of that relation.

A testable Whorfian hypothesis will have a schematic form something like this:

• Linguistic part : Feature F is obligatory in L 1 but optional in L 2 .
• Psychological part : Speaking a language with obligatory feature F bears relation R to the cognitive effect C .

The relation R might in principle be causation or determination, but it is important to see that it might merely be correlation, or slight favoring; and the non-linguistic cognitive effect C might be readily suppressible or revisable.

Dan Slobin (1996) presents a view that competes with Whorfian hypotheses as standardly understood. He hypothesizes that when the speakers are using their cognitive abilities in the service of a linguistic ability (speaking, writing, translating, etc.), the language they are planning to use to express their thought will have a temporary online effect on how they express their thought. The claim is that as long as language users are thinking in order to frame their speech or writing or translation in some language, the mandatory features of that language will influence the way they think.

On Slobin’s view, these effects quickly attenuate as soon as the activity of thinking for speaking ends. For example, if a speaker is thinking for writing in Spanish, then Slobin’s hypothesis would predict that given the obligatory formal/informal 2nd-person pronoun distinction they would pay greater attention to the formal/informal character of their social relationships with their audience than if they were writing in English. But this effect is not permanent. As soon as they stop thinking for speaking, the effect of Spanish on their thought ends.

Slobin’s non-Whorfian linguistic relativist hypothesis raises the importance of psychological research on bilinguals or people who currently use two or more languages with a native or near-native facility. This is because one clear way to test Slobin-like hypotheses relative to Whorfian hypotheses would be to find out whether language correlated non-linguistic cognitive differences between speakers hold for bilinguals only when are thinking for speaking in one language, but not when they are thinking for speaking in some other language. If the relevant cognitive differences appeared and disappeared depending on which language speakers were planning to express themselves in, it would go some way to vindicate Slobin-like hypotheses over more traditional Whorfian Hypotheses. Of course, one could alternately accept a broadening of Whorfian hypotheses to include Slobin-like evanescent effects. Either way, attention must be paid to the persistence and revisability of the linguistic effects.

Kousta et al. (2008) shows that “for bilinguals there is intraspeaker relativity in semantic representations and, therefore, [grammatical] gender does not have a conceptual, non-linguistic effect” (843). Grammatical gender is obligatory in the languages in which it occurs and has been claimed by Whorfians to have persistent and enduring non-linguistic effects on representations of objects (Boroditsky et al. 2003). However, Kousta et al. supports the claim that bilinguals’ semantic representations vary depending on which language they are using, and thus have transient effects. This suggests that although some semantic representations of objects may vary from language to language, their non-linguistic cognitive effects are transitory.

Some advocates of Whorfianism have held that if Whorfian hypotheses were true, then meaning would be globally and radically indeterminate. Thus, the truth of Whorfian hypotheses is equated with global linguistic relativism—a well known self-undermining form of relativism. But as we have seen, not all Whorfian hypotheses are global hypotheses: they are about what is induced by particular linguistic features. And the associated non-linguistic perceptual and cognitive differences can be quite small, perhaps insignificant. For example, Thierry et al. (2009) provides evidence that an obligatory lexical distinction between light and dark blue affects Greek speakers’ color perception in the left hemisphere only. And the question of the degree to which this affects sensuous experience is not addressed.

The fact that Whorfian hypotheses need not be global linguistic relativist hypotheses means that they do not conflict with the claim that there are language universals. Structuralists of the first half of the 20th century tended to disfavor the idea of universals: Martin Joos’s characterization of structuralist linguistics as claiming that “languages can differ without limit as to either extent or direction” (Joos 1966, 228) has been much quoted in this connection. If the claim that languages can vary without limit were conjoined with the claim that languages have significant and permanent effects on the concepts and worldview of their speakers, a truly profound global linguistic relativism would result. But neither conjunct should be accepted. Joos’s remark is regarded by nearly all linguists today as overstated (and merely a caricature of the structuralists), and Whorfian hypotheses do not have to take a global or deterministic form.

John Lucy, a conscientious and conservative researcher of Whorfian hypotheses, has remarked:

We still know little about the connections between particular language patterns and mental life—let alone how they operate or how significant they are…a mere handful of empirical studies address the linguistic relativity proposal directly and nearly all are conceptually flawed. (Lucy 1996, 37)

Although further empirical studies on Whorfian hypotheses have been completed since Lucy published his 1996 review article, it is hard to find any that have satisfied the criteria of:

• adequately utilizing both the relevant linguistic and psychological research,
• focusing on obligatory rather than optional linguistic features,
• stating hypotheses in a clear testable way, and
• ruling out relevant competing Slobin-like hypotheses.

There is much important work yet to be done on testing the range of Whorfian hypotheses and other forms of linguistic conceptual relativism, and on understanding the significance of any Whorfian hypotheses that turn out to be well supported.

Copyright © 2024 by Barbara C. Scholz Francis Jeffry Pelletier < francisp @ ualberta . ca > Geoffrey K. Pullum < pullum @ gmail . com > Ryan Nefdt < ryan . nefdt @ uct . ac . za >

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Adam Becker

Author and astrophysicist, weak forms and strong forms.

For Cameron Neylon, because he kept asking me for this…

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 1 states that language affects thought — how we speak influences how we think. Or, at least, that’s one form of the hypothesis, the weak form. The strong form of Sapir-Whorf says that language determines thought, that how we speak forms a hard boundary on how and what we think. The weak form of Sapir-Whorf says that we drive an ATV across the terrain of thought; language can smooth the path in some areas and create rocks and roadblocks in others, but it doesn’t fundamentally limit where we can go. The strong form, in contrast, says we drive a steam train of thought, and language lays down the rails. There’s an intricate maze of forks and switchbacks spanning the continent, but at the end of the day we can only go where the rails will take us — we can’t lay down new track, no matter how we might try.

Most linguists today accept that some form of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis must be true: the language(s) we speak definitely affect how we think and act. But most linguists also accept that the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can’t be true, just as a matter of empirical fact. New words are developed, new concepts formed, new trails blazed on the terrain of thought. Some tasks may be easier or harder depending on whether your language is particularly suited for them — though even this is in dispute . But it’s simply not the case that we can’t think about things if we don’t have the words for them, nor that language actually determines our thought. In short, while the weak form of Sapir-Whorf is probably correct, the strong form is wrong. And this makes some sense: it certainly seems like language affects our thoughts, but it doesn’t seem like language wholly determines our thoughts.

But the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn’t the only theory with strong and weak forms — in fact, there’s a whole pattern of theories like this, and associated rhetorical dangers that go along with them. The pattern looks like this:

• Start with a general theoretical statement about the world, where…
• …there are two forms, a weak form and a strong form, and…
• …the weak form is obviously true — how could it not be? — and…
• …the strong form is obviously false, or at least much more controversial. Then, the rhetorical danger rears its head, and…
• …arguments for the (true) weak form are appropriated, unmodified or nearly so, as arguments for the strong form by the proponents of the latter. (You also sometimes see this in reverse: people who are eager to deny the strong form rejecting valid arguments for the weak form.)

I don’t know why (5) happens, but I suspect (with little to no proof) that this confusion stems from rejection of a naive view of the world. Say you start with a cartoonishly simple picture of some phenomenon — for example, say you believe that thought isn’t affected by language in any way at all. Then you hear (good!) arguments for the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which shows this cartoon picture is too simple to capture reality. With your anchor line to your old idea cut, you veer to the strong form of Sapir-Whorf. Then, later, when arguing for your new view, you use the same arguments that convinced you your old naive idea was false — namely, arguments for the weak form. (This also suggests that when (5) happens in reverse, this is founded in the same basic confusion: people defend themselves from the strong form by attacking the weak form because they would feel unmoored from their (naive) views if the weak form were true.) But why this happens is all speculation on my part. All I know for sure is that it does happen.

Cultural relativism about scientific truth is another good example. The two forms look something like this:

Weak form : Human factors like culture, history, and economics influence the practice of science, and thereby the content of our scientific theories.

Strong form : Human factors like culture, history, and economics wholly determine the content of our scientific theories.

It’s hard to see how the weak form could be wrong. Science is a human activity, and like any human activity, it’s affected by culture, economics, history, and other human factors. But the strong form claims that science is totally disconnected from anything like a “real world,” is simply manufactured by a variety of cultural and social forces, and has no special claim to truth. This is just not true. In her excellent book Brain Storm — itself about how the weak form of this thesis has played out in the spurious science of innate gender differences in the development of the human brain — Rebecca Jordan-Young forcefully rejects the strong form of relativism about science, and addresses both directions of the rhetorical confusion that arises from confounding the weak form with the strong:

The fact that science is not, and can never be, a simple mirror of the world also does not imply that science is simply “made up” and is not constrained by material phenomena that actually exist—the material world “pushes back” and exerts its own effects in science, even if we accept the postmodern premise that we humans have no hope of a direct access to that world that is unmediated by our own practices and culturally determined cognitive and linguistic structures. There is no need to dogmatically insist (against all evidence) that science really is objective in order to believe in science as a good and worthwhile endeavor, and even to believe in science as a particularly useful and trustworthy way of learning about the world. 2

Successful scientific theories, in general, must bear some resemblance to the world at large. Indeed, the success of scientific theories in predicting phenomena in the world would be nothing short of a miracle if there were absolutely no resemblance between the content of those theories and the content of the world. 3 That’s not to say that our theories are perfect representations of the world, nor that they are totally unaffected by cultural and political factors: far from it. I’m writing a book right now that’s (partly) about the cultural and historical factors influencing the debate on the foundations of quantum physics. But the content of our scientific theories is certainly not solely determined by human factors. Science is our best attempt to learn about the nature of the world. It’s not perfect. That’s OK.

There are many people, working largely in Continental philosophy and critical theory of various stripes, who advocate the strong form of relativism about science. 4 Yet most of their arguments which are ostensibly in favor of this strong form are actually arguments for the weak form: that culture plays some role in determining the content of our best scientific theories. 5 And that’s simply not the same thing.

Another, much more popular example of a strong and weak form problem is the set of claims around the “power of positive thinking.” The weak form suggests that being more confident and positive can make you happier, healthier, and more successful. This is usually true, and it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be usually true — though there are many specific counterexamples. For example, positive thinking can’t keep your house from being destroyed by a hurricane. Yet the strong form of positive-thinking claims — known as “the law of attraction,” and popularized by The Secret — suggests exactly that. This states that positive thinking, and positive thinking alone, can literally change the world around you for the better, preventing and reversing all bad luck and hardship. 6 Not only is this manifestly untrue, but the logical implications are morally repugnant: if bad things do happen to you, it must be a result of not thinking positively enough . For example, if you have cancer, and it’s resistant to treatment, that must be your fault . While this kind of neo-Calvinist victim-blaming is bad enough, it becomes truly monstrous — and the flaw in the reasoning particularly apparent — when extended from unfortunate individual circumstances to systematically disadvantaged groups. The ultimate responsibility for slavery, colonialism, genocide, and institutionalized bigotry quite obviously does not lie with the victims’ purported inability to wish hard enough for a better world.

In short, easily-confused strong and weak forms of a theory abound. I’m not claiming that this is anything like an original idea. All I’m saying is that some theories come in strong and weak forms, that sometimes the weak forms are obviously true and the strong obviously false, and that in those cases, it’s easy to take rhetorical advantage (deliberately or not) of this confusion. You could argue that the weak form directly implies the strong form in some cases, and maybe it does. But that’s not generally true, and you have to do a lot of work to make that argument — work that often isn’t done.

Again, I strongly suspect other people have come up with this idea. When I’ve talked with people about this, they’ve generally picked it up very quickly and come up with examples I didn’t think of. This seems to be floating around. If someone has a good citation for it, I’d be immensely grateful.

Image credit: Zink Dawg at English Wikipedia , CC-BY 3.0. I was strongly tempted to use this image instead.

• This is apparently a historical misnomer, but we’ll ignore that for now. [ ↩ ]
• Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, in Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 299-300. Emphasis in the original. [ ↩ ]
• See J.J.C. Smart,  Philosophy and Scientific Realism , and Hilary Putnam,  Mathematics, Matter, and Method . [ ↩ ]
• Bruno Latour is the first name that comes to mind. [ ↩ ]
• See, for example, Kuhn, who even seems to have confused himself about whether he was advocating the strong or the weak version. [ ↩ ]
• The “arguments” in favor of this kind of nonsense take advantage of more than just the confusion between the strong and weak forms of the thesis about positive thinking. They also rely on profound misunderstandings about quantum physics and other perversions of science. But let’s put that aside for now. [ ↩ ]

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One thought on “ weak forms and strong forms ”.

There’s Occam’s Rusty Razor at work. Weak versions of theories necessitate lots of conditionals. Simpler just to eschew all conditionals. But simplicity itself is a virtue only with lots of subtlety and conditionality. Rusty razors butcher. Eschew Occam’s Rusty Razor.

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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.

Thomas Barwick / Getty Images

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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38 Cognitive Linguistics and 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: 18 September 2012
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Linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) is a general cover term for the conjunction of two basic notions. The first notion is that languages are relative, that is, that they vary in their expression of concepts in noteworthy ways. The second notion is that the linguistic expression of concepts has some degree of influence over conceptualization in cognitive domains, which need not necessarily be linguistically mediated. This article explores the treatment of linguistic relativity within works generally representative of cognitive linguistics and presents a survey of classic and more modern (pre- and post-1980s) research within linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. First, it provides a brief overview of the history of linguistic relativity theorizing from Wilhelm von Humboldt through to Benjamin Whorf. It then discusses the role of literacy to cognitive and cultural development, folk classification, and formulations of linguistic relativity.

1. Introduction

Linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir - Whorf Hypothesis ) is a general cover term for the conjunction of two basic notions. The first notion is that languages are relative , that is, that they vary in their expression of concepts in noteworthy ways. What constitutes “noteworthy” is, of course, a matter of some interpretation. Cognitive scientists interested in human universals will often describe some particular linguistic variation as essentially minor, while others, for example, some anthropological linguists, may describe the same variation as significant.

The second component notion to linguistic relativity is that the linguistic expression of concepts has some degree of influence over conceptualization in cognitive domains, which need not necessarily be linguistically mediated. In textbooks, this notion of language affecting conceptualization is typically divided into “strong” and “weak” hypotheses. The “strong” hypothesis (also known as linguistic determinism ) is that the variable categories of language essentially control the available categories of general cognition. As thus stated, this “strong” hypothesis is typically dismissed as untenable. The “weak” hypothesis states that the linguistic categories may influence the categories of thought but are not fundamentally restrictive. As thus stated, this “weak” hypothesis is typically considered trivially true.

Arguably, this simplification of the broad issue of the relationship between linguistic and cognitive categorization into two simple (“strong” vs. “weak”) statements has impeded development of genuinely testable hypotheses and has helped lead studies of linguistic relativity into academic ill-repute. Modern research into the general question of linguistic relativity has focused on more narrowly stated hypotheses for testing, that is, investigating the specific relationships between particular linguistic categories (e.g., the categories of number, color, or spatial direction) and more exactly specified cognitive operations (e.g., encoding into long-term memory or deductive reasoning).

This chapter is organized as (i) a brief history of the research question (section 2 ); (ii) a discussion of the challenges in designing research into linguistic relativity (section 3 ); (iii) the treatment of linguistic relativity within works generally representative of Cognitive Linguistics (section 4 ); and (iv) a survey of classic and more modern (pre- and post-1980s) research within linguistics, anthropology, and psychology (section 5 ).

In addition to this chapter, several other surveys of linguistic relativity may be consulted. Lucy ( 1997a ) gives a broad overview of different approaches which have investigated linguistic relativity, while Lucy ( 1992b ) elaborates on a particular empirical approach and provides detailed critiques of previous empirical work. Lee ( 1996 ) provides historical documentation to the often poorly understood work of Benjamin Lee Whorf (see also Lee 2000 ). Hill and Mannheim ( 1992 ) trace the history of the notion of world view with respect to language through twentieth-century anthropology, from Boas through Cognitive Linguistics of the 1980s to the work of John Lucy. Hill and Mannheim also provides a useful overview of the anthropological cum semiotic approach to culturally embedded language use—see especially Hanks ( 1990 ) and Silverstein ( 1985 , 1987 ).

Smith ( 1996 ) also discusses the writings of Sapir and Whorf to clarify that most popular accounts of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis are not directly derivative of their work. She is also concerned that the relatively large-scale dismissal of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in academic culture has been at the expense of serious research into the relationships between language and thought. Similar discussion of the “demise” of the “Whorf Hypothesis” and the misconstrual of Whorf's actual writings can be found in Alford ( 1978 ). 1

Koerner ( 2000 ) also provides a survey of the “pedigree” of linguistic relativity “from Locke to Lucy,” that is, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. chapters 10–12 of Foley ( 1997 ) as well provide historical coverage of the notion, with summaries of fairly recent work with spatial language and classifiers. Duranti ( 1997 ) similarly provides historical coverage with particular emphasis on the American anthropology traditions.

Hunt and Agnoli ( 1991 ) revisit linguistic relativity from the perspective of cognitive psychology, which had largely rejected the notion as either false or uninteresting during the 1970s. Within canonical Cognitive Linguistics, Lakoff ( 1987 ) dedicates chapter 18 of Women , Fire , and Dangerous Things to discussions of evidence for and types of linguistic relativity. Many of the principles from that chapter have informed the remainder of his work.

2. Historical Speculation and Modern Formulations

Given the wealth of historical surveys of linguistic relativity, this chapter will focus more on modern work and methodological issues. However, a brief overview of the history of linguistic relativity theorizing will help to situate the modern research questions.

2.1. From Humboldt through Whorf

The most widely cited intellectual antecedent for linguistic relativity is the work of Humboldt. Later, the work of Boas is widely seen as the inheritor of the Humboldtian notions and through him, the concern with linguistic relativity was taken up in the writings of Sapir, who developed the vital notion of the “patterns” or structural systematicity of language as being particularly relevant to the relationship between language, mind, and culture.

Humboldt's principal work addressing linguistic relativity is Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlecht [On the diversity of human language construction and its influence on the mental development of the human species]. There are many editions and translations of this work; for a recent edition of Peter Heath's English translation, see Losonsky ( 1999 ). The philosophical precursors to Humboldt, as well as linguistic relativity in general, is discussed in Manchester ( 1985 ), and an overview of Humboldt's notion of language and Weltansicht (‘world view’) is provided in Brown ( 1967 ).

The writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf are best known through Carroll's edited collection Whorf ( 1956 ). This collection helped to popularize the notion that the categories of language may influence the categories of thought. However, Lee ( 1996 ) argues—especially in light of the previously unpublished “Yale report” (see Whorf and Trager [ 1938 ] 1996 )—that Whorf was concerned with the interpenetration of language and thought; that is, the two words language and thought refer to aspects of a single system, and it is a misapprehension to ask in what way one affects the other. This is quite distinct from the more modular view of language processing dominant in current psychology and linguistics.

2.2. Literacy

While modern linguistics places considerable emphasis on spoken language—which means that this chapter will focus on the potential cognitive impact of the categories found in spoken or signed languages—the role of literacy to cognitive and cultural development has long been a subject of debate.

Early twentieth-century experiments on the relationship between literacy and cognitive development were conducted by Aleksandr Luria and colleagues (for an overview in English, see Luria 1976 ). This classic work investigated the effects of previously established, Soviet-era adult literacy programs on the development of various cognitive skills. There were a number of methodological problems with that work—perhaps the most significant one being the confounding of formal schooling with the acquisition of literacy (or conversely, the lack of formal schooling with nonliterate populations). The largest single effort to overcome this common confound is reported by Scribner and Cole ( 1981 ), who investigated effects of literacy acquisition in the absence of formal schooling. The designs and subject pools were still not completely free of confounding factors and the results, while fascinating, give a largely mixed picture of the effects of literacy as an independent factor on cognition.

“The literacy hypothesis,” namely that various cultural features can be traced to the development of literacy in the history of a given culture, has been subject to considerable debate. Goody and Watt ( 1962 ), one of the better known works, extolled the effects of specifically alphabetic literacy as critical in the development of early Greek and later European culture. This view came under considerable criticism, and Goody himself later backed away from the specific claims about alphabetic literacy. 2 However, on a more general level, the claim that literacy engenders certain cognitive changes—especially enhanced metalinguistic awareness—continues to be argued. Readers interested in the effects of literacy on cognition could also consult Scinto ( 1986 ), Graff ( 1987 ), Olson ( 1991 , 2002 ), Ong ( 1992 ), and references therein.

Rather than studying the general effects of reading and writing on cognition, one line of research has been concerned with the effects of learning particular writing systems. Morais et al. ( 1979 ) investigate the effects of child-acquired literacy on phonemic awareness, and Read et al. ( 1986 ) present evidence arguing that alphabetic literacy, but not logographic and syllabic literacy, leads to phonemic awareness. In Danziger and Pederson ( 1998 ) and Pederson ( 2003 ), I argue that familiarity with specific graphemic qualities can lead to differences in visual categorization in nonwriting/nonreading tasks.

2.3. Folk Classification

Anthropologists have long been concerned with folk classification , that is, the culturally specific ways in which linguistic and other categories are organized into coherent systems. Perhaps the richest body of work is in the area of taxonomies of natural kinds (plants, animals, etc.). This research is conveniently served by having a scientific standard for comparison. While there is abundant anecdotal evidence that people interact with natural kinds according to their taxonomical relations to other natural kinds (e.g., X is a pet, so treat it like other pets), there has not been much in the way of psychological-style testing of specific linguistic relativity hypotheses in this domain. For an introduction to folk classification, see Hunn ( 1977 , 1982 ), Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven ( 1973 ), Berlin ( 1978 ), and Blount ( 1993 ).

2.4. Formulations of Linguistic Relativity

There are many semantic domains one could search for linguistic relativity effects—that is, domains in which one might find linguistic categories conditioning nonlinguistic categorization. For example, cultures and languages are notorious for having varying kinship terms, which group into major types with various subtypes. Importantly, the categories of allowable behaviors with kin tend to correspond to the grouping by kinship terminology. For example, South Indian (Dravidian) languages systematically distinguish between cross-cousins and parallel cousins, with marriage allowed between cross-cousins and incest taboo applying to parallel cousins. In contrast, North Indian languages typically classify all cousins with siblings and incest taboo applies to all (see Carter 1973 ).

However important sexual reproduction may be to our species, the standards of marriage are clearly the result of cultural convention overlaid on biological predispositions. Accordingly, finding linguistic variation corresponding to categories of human behavior in such a domain is not generally taken as a particularly revealing demonstration of linguistic relativity. Likewise, elaborated vocabulary sets in expert domains and impoverished sets where there is little experience, however interesting, are also not taken as particularly revealing. While a tropical language speaker may lack the broad vocabulary of English for discussing frozen precipitation, that same speaker may be quite particular in distinguishing what English speakers lump together as ‘cousins’.

In other words, cases of categorization which are dependent on environmentally or culturally variable experience are generally considered uninteresting domains for the study of linguistic relativity. This corresponds to the late twentieth-century bias toward universalism in the cognitive sciences; namely, for variation to be noteworthy, it should be in a domain where variation was not previously thought to be possible. That is to say, for linguistic relativity to be broadly interesting, it must apply within cognitive domains which operate on “basic” and universal human experience.

3. Challenges in Researching Linguistic Relativity

3.1. intralinguistic variation.

Speakers may use language differently across different contexts, and this difference may be indicative of shifting conceptual representations. One of the few studies within Cognitive Linguistics to empirically address intralinguistic variation is Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema ( 1994 , especially chapter 4 : “Onomasiological Variation”), which explores alternative expressions as the representation of different construals and perspectivization.

Of course, some of these alternative expressions may be confined to some subcommunities and dialects. While linguistic relativity is typically discussed as the difference across speakers of distinct languages, there is every reason to wonder about parallels with differences in conceptualization that may exist within a single language community. Speakers of different dialects may have different linguistic patterns which might be hypothesized to correspond to different habitual conceptualizations. In Pederson ( 1993 , 1995 ), I investigate communities of Tamil speakers who systematically vary in their preference for terms of spatial reference, but who otherwise speak essentially the same dialect.

The work of Loftus ( 1975 ) has demonstrated that the choice of particular linguistic expressions at the time of encoding or recall may well influence nonlinguistic representation of events. Extrapolating from Loftus's work, we might wonder to what extent language generally can prime specific nonlinguistic representations—I call this the language as prime model. The fact that social humans are surrounded by linguistic input suggests that there might be a cumulative effect of this language priming. Indeed, if a particular linguistic encoding presented before a certain perception influences the nonlinguistic encoding or recall of that perception, what then might be the cumulative effect of one type of linguistic encoding rather than another being used throughout a speaker's personal history? If, for example, the classifiers of a speaker's habitual language force categorization of certain objects as ‘long and thin’, it seems reasonable that such objects may be remembered as potentially longer or thinner than they actually were.

Of course, if there were no consistent pattern to the linguistic priming, then we would not expect any single representation to become dominant. Indeed, Kay ( 1996 ) has argued that there is considerable flexibility within any language for alternative representations, and speakers may well alternate from one representation to another. This suggests that rather than a single and simple “world-view” necessary for a cleanly testable hypothesis, speakers may draw on complex “repertoires” of representations. While this does not preclude the possibility of systematic differences across languages having different repertoires, it certainly argues that the differences are far less obvious.

Given flexibility within a single language, a linguistic relativity hypothesis to be tested may need to compare patterns which are pervasive in one language and underexpressed in another language. This can be difficult to compensate for in an experimental design. A balanced design might seek opposing, but functionally equivalent systems, which are dominant in each language community. Each community may have both systems in common, but not to the same level of default familiarity. Of course, the experimental measure needs to be sufficiently non-priming itself so as to allow each subject population to rely on their default mode of representation.

3.2. Selecting a Domain

Universals in categorization may be of more than one type. Most relevantly, some categories may be essentially innate, that is, an internal predisposition of the organism. Other universal categories maybe the result of commonalities of all human environments in conjunction with our innately driven mechanisms. Even assuming that we can reliably presume that certain categories are universal, determining which are purely innate and which derive from interaction with universal properties of the environment is not a trivial task.

Variation in innate properties is impossible—except inasmuch as the variation is within innately proscribed limits—so we cannot look for linguistic relativity effects in these domains. For linguistic relativity effects to be both interesting to cognitive scientists and robust in their operations, they must apply in a domain which is generally presumed universal by virtue of the common environment, but which can be hypothesized to be nonuniversal. As discussed above, demonstrating effects from language type in cognitive domains with wide variation is unexciting. It follows that the researcher interested in testing linguistic relativity best seeks a domain which is hypothesized to be fairly basic to cognition, but just shy of exhibiting a universal pattern.

This motivates modern linguistic relativity studies to examine categorization in domains presumed to derive somewhat immediately from basic perceptual stimuli or fundamental mechanisms of reasoning. The majority of such empirical studies concern categorization of visual or spatial properties of objects or the environment. A few studies have examined purported differences in reasoning, but these are inherently more difficult to pursue. Object properties and the environment can be experimentally controlled, but processes of reasoning—especially in cross-cultural work—are notoriously difficult to measure while maintaining adequate control of subject variables.

3.3. Independent Evidence for Language and Cognition

Linguists—especially cognitive linguists—frequently claim that a particular linguistic form represents a particular underlying conceptualization. Obviously, however, any substantial claim of a relationship between language and cognition needs independent assessment of each and a correlation established between the two.

Perhaps surprisingly, most work on linguistic relativity spends remarkably little effort demonstrating the linguistic facts prior to seeking the hypothesized cognitive variable. Some of the most severe criticisms of linguistic relativity studies have worried about this insufficient linguistic description. Lucy ( 1992b ) is especially clear in his call for more careful linguistic analysis preparatory to linguistic relativity experimentation.

Given the relative accessibility of the linguistic facts compared with the difficulty inferring cognitive behavior from behavioral measures, one could argue that the often minimal characterization of language is of unacceptable sloppiness. More charitably, linguistic facts are typically quite complex, and in an effort to seek a testable hypothesis, a certain amount of simplification becomes inevitable. Unfortunately, there is no standard to use in evaluating the adequacy of a linguistic description for linguistic relativity work other than using the general standards of descriptive linguistics. Descriptive linguistics tends to be as exhaustive as is practically possible and does not necessarily foster the creation of simple hypotheses about linguistic and conceptual categorization. On the other hand, it is difficult to argue that studies in linguistic relativity should hold their linguistic descriptions to a lower standard.

A related problem is the variability of language. Since many different varieties of language exist depending on communicative and descriptive context, it can be quite misleading to speak of Hopi or English as having a specific characteristic, unless one can argue that this characteristic is true and uniquely true (e.g., there are no competitive constructions) in all contexts. This is, needless to say, a difficult endeavor, but failing to argue the general applicability of the pattern invites the next linguist with expertise in the language to pull forth numerous counterexamples. Studies most closely following the approaches advocated by Whorf have tended to focus on basic grammatical features of the language which are presumed to be fairly context independent. However, this may overlook other linguistic features which may well be relevant to a particular hypothesis of linguistic and conceptual categorization.

One way to partially circumvent this problem was followed in Pederson et al. ( 1998 ), which seeks to describe language characteristics typically used for, in this case, table-top spatial reference. There is no attempt to include or exclude information on the basis of whether or not the relevant language elements were grammaticized or lexicalized. Rather, if the information was present in the language used for a particular context, these linguistic categories are presumed to be available conceptual categories within same or similar contexts. This approach leaves unanswered the question of how broadly the linguistic description (or for that matter the cognitive description as well) applies to the subject population in a variety of other contexts, but it does help ensure that the linguistic description is the most exact match for the cognitive enquiry.

3.4. Subvocalization or What Is Nonlinguistic?

If independent measures are to be taken of both language use and cognitive processes, then great care is necessary to ensure that the behavioral measure for the nonlinguistic cognitive process is not covertly measuring linguistically mediated behavior.

Ideally, the entire cognitive task would be nonlinguistic, but as a practical minimum, the instructions and training for the task must be couched in language which is neutral with respect to the current hypothesis. This is particularly difficult to manage when a language has grammatically obligatory encoding. How do we interpret an effect which may be due to obligatory encoding in the instructions? Is this just an effect of the instructions, or can we interpret this as a general language effect because the instructions only exemplify the continual linguistic context the subjects live within?

There is a general presumption that instructions to the subjects should be in the subjects' native language. One might be tempted to use a shared second language as a type of neutral metalanguage for task instructions, but this introduces unexplored variables. If there is the possibility of a cognitive effect from the regular use of one's native language, then there is also the possibility of an effect from the immediate use of the language of instruction. Additionally, it is more difficult to be certain that all subjects understand the second-language instructions in exactly the same way as the experimenter. Finally, it is unclear how one would guarantee that the language of instruction is neutral with respect to anticipated behavioral outcomes. The very fact that it may mark different categories from the native language may influence the outcome in unpredictable ways.

It is safest therefore to minimize any language-based instruction. General instructions (e.g., “Sit here”) cannot be excluded, but critical information is best presented through neutral examples with minimal accompanying language. Since a dearth of talking makes it more difficult to monitor subject comprehension, it is imperative that the experimental design include a built-in check (e.g., control trials ) to ensure that each subject understands the task in the same way—except, of course, for the variation for which the task was designed to test. An account of the effects of subtle changes in instruction with children in explorations with base ten number systems can be found in Saxton and Towse ( 1998 ).

Another concern is that subjects involved in an ostensibly nonlanguage measure actually choose to use language as part of the means of determining their behavior. For example, the subjects may subvocalize their reasoning in a complex problem and then any patterning of behavior along the lines of the linguistic categories is scarcely surprising. In Pederson ( 1995 ), I address this concern by arguing that if subjects have distinct levels of linguistic and conceptual representations, they should only choose to approach a nonlinguistic task using linguistic means if there were a sufficiently close match between these two levels with respect to the experiment. In effect, a subject's unforced decision to rely on linguistic categories can be understood as validation of at least one sort of linguistic relativity hypothesis.

3.5. Finding Behavioral Consequences of Linguistically Determined Cognitive Variation

Variation in categorization of spatial or perceptual features can be of relatively minor consequence. Whether one thinks of pencils more fundamentally as tools or as long skinny objects has probably little effect on their employment.

The most basic features of humans and their environment are stable across linguistic communities. Gravity pulls in a constant direction, visual perception is roughly comparable, and so forth. If there are cognitive differences across communities with respect to universal features, then these different cognitive patterns must have functional equivalence ; that is, different ways of thinking about the same thing must largely allow the same behavioral responses. For example, whether a line of objects is understood as proceeding from left to right or from north to south makes little difference under most circumstances. If the objects are removed and the subject must rebuild them, either understanding of the array will give the same rebuilt line with no effect on accuracy. Accordingly, any experimental task must select an uncommon condition where the principle of functional equivalence fails to hold (see especially Levinson 1996 ). To continue this example, if the subject is rotated by 90 or 180 degrees before being asked to rebuild an array, the underlying representation (left-right or north-south) should result in a different direction for the rebuilding.

Without a context which effectively disambiguates the possible underlying representations from behavioral responses, a researcher must demonstrate that one subject population has a deficient or improved performance on a task and that this differential performance corresponds to a difference in (default) linguistic encoding. There is a long and sordid history of attributing deficiencies to populations that the investigator does not belong to. Accordingly, it is entirely appropriate that the burden of proof fall particularly hard on the researcher claiming that a studied population is somehow impaired on a given task as a result of their pattern of linguistic encoding. Even if the population is claimed to have an ability which is augmented by linguistic encoding, it is difficult to demonstrate that any difference in ability derives specifically from linguistic differences and not from any of a myriad of environmental (perhaps even nutritional) conditions.

Related to this is the concern for the ecological validity of the experimental task. A task may fail to measure subject ability or preferences owing to unfamiliarity of the materials, instructions, or testing context. Further, it is difficult to decide on the basis of just a few experiments which effects can be generalized to hold for nonexperimental contexts—to wit, the complexity of daily life. This is not, however, an argument against experimentation as the inherently interpretive nature of simple observational data ultimately requires experimentally controlled measures.

3.6. Types of Experimental Design

Various types of experimental tasks have been used for investigating the cognitive side of linguistic relativity. Whatever research methods are used, reliability of the results is far more likely if there is triangulation from a number of observational and experimental methods.

Sorting and Triads Tasks

Perhaps the most common design used in linguistic relativity studies is a sorting task. Quite simply, the subject is presented with a number of stimuli and is asked to group them into categories. These categories may be ad hoc (subject determined) or preselected (researcher determined). Multiple strategies may be used for the sorting task, giving different sorting results. The most common variant of the sorting task is the triads task which presents a single stimulus to the subjects and asks them to group it with either of two other stimuli or stimuli sets; that is, does stimulus X group better with A or with B? (hence, the term AXB test in some research paradigms). For an archetypal example of a triads task, see Davies et al. ( 1998 ).

This task is easy to administer as long as the stimuli are reasonably tangible, interpretable, and able to be considered in a nearly simultaneous manner. One consideration of sorting designs is that subjects often report awareness of multiple strategies which might be employed. Of course, the researcher cannot indicate which is a preferred strategy and can only instruct the subject to sort according to “first impression,” “whatever seems most natural,” or other such instructions. The interpretation of these instructions may add an uncontrolled variable. Further, sorting tasks inherently invite the subjects to respond according to their beliefs about the researcher's expectations, which may not in fact be what would be the normal sorting decision outside of this task.

Discrimination Tasks

Other tasks seek to find different discriminations across populations. As a practical consequence, differences usually boil down to one population making finer or more distinctions than another population; see, for example, much of the work on color discrimination and linguistic labeling discussed in the debates in Hardin and Maffi ( 1997 ). However, it is at least theoretically possible that one population might be more sensitive to certain features at the expense of other features and that a contrasting population would show the reverse pattern.

A limitation of discrimination tasks is that for them to be interpretable, one must be able to assume that beyond the independent variable of different linguistic systems, all subjects brought the same degree of attention, general task satisfying abilities, and so on to the experimental task. Should, for example, one population be less likely to be attentionally engaged, then this reduces the possibility of isolating a linguistic effect on cognition.

Problem Solving Tasks

Problem solving tasks are readily used in many types of research. In linguistic relativity studies, they are typically of two design types: difficult solution or alternative solution.

The first type involves a task which provides some difficulty in finding the solution. Some subjects are anticipated to be better or worse than others at solving the task. As with reduced discrimination just discussed, it is extremely difficult to argue that it is specifically the categories of language which lead to differential performance. The counterfactual reasoning task employed by Bloom ( 1981 ) was such a task, and the difficulty in interpreting its results was part of much of the controversy surrounding that work.

The second type of problem solving tasks allow for alternative solutions each of which should be indicative of a different underlying representation. As such, these are similar to triads tasks in that they allow each subject to find the most “natural” solution for them (at least within the given experimental context). For example, in Pederson ( 1995 ) I describe a transitivity task in which subjects know how each of two objects are spatially related to a third object. They must then decide which side of the second object the first/test object must be placed. Depending on how these relationships are encoded, the test object will be placed on a different side of the second object. Like triads tasks, there is the potential problem that the subjects may be aware of the possibility of multiple solutions, prompting responses derived from any number of uncontrolled factors.

Embedded Tasks

Within psychological research, there is a common solution to the problem of subject awareness of multiple possible responses. Namely, the actual measure of the task is embedded within another task for which the subject is more consciously aware. For example, subjects may be asked to respond as to whether a figure is masculine or feminine, but the researcher is really measuring the distribution of attention to the figures. While the embedded task may still be influenced by subject expectations, it is an indirect and presumably nonreflected influence. As such, one can argue that the responses measured by the embedded task are more likely to correspond to default behaviors used outside of this exact experimental context. The “Animals in a Row” task discussed in Pederson et al. ( 1998 ) was one such task, where subjects understood the task as one to recreate a sequence of toy animals, but the critical dependent measure was the direction the animals were facing when subjects placed them on the table-top before them.

Variable Responses

The researcher must also be careful in coding fixed response types from the subjects. It may be that subject preference is for a response type not allowed by the forced choice, and when pigeonholed into a different response type, subjects may not be responding in a manner reflecting their typical underlying representations. Also, certain patterns (or lack of patterns) of responses may actually indicate a preference for a response type not anticipated by the experimental design. For example, in the “Animals in a Row” task just discussed, some populations—and not others—appear on the scoring sheets as preserving the orientation of the original stimuli roughly half the time. On closer inspection, many of these subjects were actually entirely consistent in giving the animals the same orientation (e.g., always facing left) regardless of the original orientation of the stimuli. Since the task appeared to be about the order and not the orientation of the animals, this is a perfectly reasonable response. Unfortunately, there was no hypothesis anticipating this response, and no claims could be made as to why some subjects and not others gave this response pattern.

3.7. Controlling Extraneous Variables

Work such as Kay and Kempton ( 1984 ) demonstrates that the effects of native language on nonlinguistic categorization tasks can vary with even slightly varied task demands. This is commonly interpreted as an indication that “relativity effects” are “weak.” A more conservative interpretation is that there are many factors (of undetermined “strength”) which can effect results and that language may be only one of many possible factors. The exact total effect of language will depend on what other nonlinguistic factors are in effect. This requires that an experimental design for linguistic relativity effects carefully control all foreseeable linguistic and nonlinguistic variables.

Linguistic Variables

Since they are most directly related to the tested hypothesis, language variables are perhaps the most critical to control in one's design.

Of fundamental importance is that one must be certain that the base language of the subjects is consistent with respect to whatever features have led to the specific hypothesis. This may seem trivial, but dialectal (and even idiolectal) variation may well have the effect that some speakers do not share certain critical linguistic features even though they ostensibly speak the same language.

Perhaps even more problematic is the issue of bilingualism. Unless all subjects are totally monolingual, this is a potential problem for the design. Generally, linguistic relativity tests presume that one's “native” language capacity is the most relevant, but this cannot preclude effects from other known languages. Age of acquisition of second languages may also vary widely; there is certainly no established model of the effects of age of acquisition on nonlinguistic category formation.

If nonnative categories have been learned, how can we assume that they are not also brought to bear on the experimental task—clouding the results in unpredictable ways? This is perhaps most insidious when the language of instruction differs from the native language. Suitably, then, serious work in linguistic relativity needs to use the native language for instruction, but even this is not necessarily a straightforward task. For example, how does one ensure that instructions to multiple populations are both exactly and suitably translated?

How to Control for Exact Translations in a Comparative Work?

Work in linguistic relativity has had an impact in translation theory. Indeed, belief in a sufficiently strong model of insurmountable language differences would suggest that complete translations would be difficult to attain. House ( 2000 ) presents an overview of the challenges of translation and suggests a solution to the problem of linguistic relativity and translation. Chafe ( 2000 ) also discusses translation issues with respect to linguistic relativity, and Slobin ( 1991 , 1996 ) uses translations in his discussions of how languages most suitably express motion events (see the section on space, below). The work of Bloom and his critics (see the discussion below) is particularly relevant for this issue because the ability to translate the experimental task from English to Chinese was central to his research question of counterfactual reasoning. Indeed, one might be skeptical of any attempt to investigate linguistic relativity in which the nonlinguistic experimental design is essentially a language-based task.

Of immediate practical concern is the translation of instructions for any research instrument itself. It is difficult enough to be confident that two subjects speaking the same language have the same understanding of a task's instructions. How, then, can the researcher be confident that translations of instructions are understood identically by speakers of different languages especially in the context of an experiment which seeks to confirm that speakers of these different languages in fact do understand the world in different ways?

The most obvious solution is to avoid linguistic instruction entirely. This does not remove the possibility that subjects understand the task differently, but it does ensure that any different understanding is not the direct result of immediate linguistic context. However, there are severe restrictions on what can be reliably and efficiently instructed without language. Understandably, then, most research relies on language-based instruction. In such cases, one must seek to phrase instructions in such a way that one sample is not more influenced by the particular choice of phrasing than the other sample.

To invent an example, imagine we are interested in the effect of evidential marking (linguistic markings which indicate how information is known to the speaker) on the salience of sources of even nonlinguistic information to speakers of a language which obligatorily marks evidentiality. This population would contrast with speakers of a language which essentially lacks routine marking. How, then, might we word our instructions? Do we use expressions typical for each language such that one set of instructions contains evidential marking and the other not? Alternatively, do we provide evidential information for both languages? In the case of the language which does not typically mark evidentials, providing this information would obviously be more “marked” in usage than for the other language. This greater markedness of the information might make the evidential information more salient for those subjects who normally do not concern themselves with any language expression of evidentiality, which in turn could make issues of evidentiality more salient than they would be under average conditions—countering the entire design of the experiment!

Recent Language Use

Another potential language factor affecting results might be preexperimental, but recent, language use. If the language of instruction can influence results, could not language use immediately prior to instruction also influence the results? Indeed, if we assume that linguistic categories prime access to parallel nonlinguistic categories, then how do we control for language use outside of the experimental setting? On the one hand, one could argue that language use outside of the experiment is exactly the independent variable under consideration, and this is controlled simply through subject selection. On the other hand, if a language has multiple ways of representing categories, what is the potential effect if a subject has most recently been using one of the less typical linguistic categories for his or her language? Once again, the cleanest solution to this risk is to test categories for which there is minimal linguistic variation within each of the examined languages. 3

Conversation during Task

The last of the language variables to consider is language use during the experiment itself. Lucy and Shwedder ( 1988 ) found that forbidding subjects to have conversations between exposure and recall in a memory task allowed a greater recall of focal color terms than of nonfocal color terms (see the subsection on color below). Subjects who had (unrelated) conversations remembered focal and nonfocal colors about equally well. While Lucy and Shwedder do not provide a model for why this might be the case, it clearly suggests that even incidental language use during and perhaps around a task can have significant influences on performance. Other work (see Gennari et al. 2002 ) has suggested that even in cases where there might normally be no particular relation between habitual language use and performance on a nonlinguistic task, language used during exposure or memorization to stimuli can lead to nonlinguistic responses in alignment with language use.

Nonlinguistic Subject Variables

Even more heterogonous to a subject sample than the linguistic variables are the cultural, educational, and other experiential variables. Subject questionnaires are the usual ways to try to control these variables in post hoc analysis, but this control is limited by the foresight to collect adequate information.

One of the more obvious variables to control or record is the amount of schooling and literacy. Unfortunately, while schooling is easily represented on an ordinal scale (first to postsecondary grades), there is little guarantee that this represents the same education especially across, but even within, two population samples. For example, literacy is also not as simple a variable as it might appear. Subjects may be literate in different languages (and scripts) and may have very different literacy practices. Coding subjects who only read the Bible in their nonnative language and other subjects who read a variety of materials in their native language as both simply “literate” clearly glosses over potentially significant differences in experience.

Expertise may also vary considerably across samples. One of the most thorny obstacles in cross-cultural psychology is comparing testing results across two populations, one of which habitually engages with experiment-like settings and the other of which does not. This may have effects beyond simple difficulty in performance, but may affect the way in which subjects understand instructions, second-guess the intentions of the experimenter, and so on. 4

Sex or gender, age, and the more physiologically based experiences are also difficult to compare. Being a woman in different societies means very different daily experiences beyond the variables of amount of schooling and the like. To what extent are subjects in their thirties the same across two populations. In one society but not another, a 35-year-old might typically be a grandparent in declining health with uncorrected vision or hearing loss.

Testing Environment

Lastly, variation in the testing environment is often difficult to control. The more broadly cross-cultural the samplings, the greater the dependence on local conditions. One might think of the ideal as an identical laboratory setup for each population sampled. However, since different subjects might react differently within such an environment, this is not necessarily a panacea (in addition to the obvious practical difficulty in implementation).

The best approach is to carefully examine the environmental features needed for the task at hand. If an experiment is about color categorization, lighting obviously needs to be controlled; if an experiment is about spatial arrays, adjacent landmarks and handedness need to be controlled; and so on. For example, in the basic experiment reported in Pederson et al. ( 1998 ), the use of table tops was not considered essential for tasks testing “table-top space,” but the use of two delimited testing surfaces and the geometrical relationship and distances between these surfaces was critical to the design. This allowed the individual experimenters to set up tables or mats on the ground/floor as was more appropriate for the broader material culture. 5

3.8. Establishing Causal Directionality

Once a correlation between a language pattern and a behavioral response has been experimentally established, the problem of establishing causal directionality remains. While this is a problem for any correlational design, it is particularly vexing for studies of linguistic relativity. Quite simply, it is difficult to rule out the possibility that subjects habitually speak the way they do as a consequence of their culture (and environment) as opposed to the possibility that the culture thinks the way it does because of their language. For discussions of the role of culture vis-à-vis language in linguistic relativity studies, see Bickel ( 2000 ), Enfield ( 2000 ), and the fairly standard reference of Hanks ( 1990 ).

In specific response to work on spatial cognition, Li and Gleitman ( 2002 ) argue that behavioral response patterns are not causally attributable to community language preferences, but rather that language use reflects cultural practice and concerns, for example, the many words for snow used by skiers—however, see also Levinson et al. ( 2002 ) for an extensive response. To the extent that the language features under investigation are roughly as changeable as the culture, this is certainly a likely possibility. On the other hand, when the language features are essentially fossilized in the grammatical system, they cannot be understood as the consequences of current cultural conditions. If anything, the pattern of grammaticized distinctions reflects the fossilized conceptualizations of one's ancestors.

4. Work within Cognitive Linguistics

Some of the earliest cognitive linguistic work (1970s) explicitly tying grammatical structure to cognition is found in studies by Talmy (see especially Talmy 1977 , 1978 ). This work largely focuses on the universal (or at least broadly found) patterns of language and has been revised and expanded in Talmy ( 2000a , 2000b ). Talmy treats language as one of many “cognitive systems” which has the “set of grammatically specified notions [constitute] the fundamental conceptual structuring system of language.… Thus, grammar broadly conceived, is the determinant of conceptual structure within one cognitive system, language” (2000a: 21–22). However, the relationship between this cognitive system (language) and others (i.e., nonlinguistic cognition) is relatively unspecified in his work. Structural commonalities between the various cognitive systems are suggested—most specifically between visual perception and language—but, importantly, Talmy avoids claims that there is any causal effect from linguistic categories to nonlinguistic categories. 6

Langacker is bolder in the relationship between grammar and cognition: in Cognitive Grammar's “view of linguistic semantics. Meaning is equated with conceptualization (in the broadest sense)” (Langacker 1987 : 55). Langacker ( 1991 ) further argues that the cognitive models underlying clause structure have prototypes which are rooted in (variable) cultural understanding. To the extent that we find interesting cross-linguistic variation, we can see the work of Talmy and Langacker as sources for linguistic relativity hypotheses to test—as, for example, Slobin ( 1996 , 2000 ) has begun with the motion event typology of Talmy ( 1985 ).

As mentioned above, Lakoff ( 1987 : chapter 18 ) directly addresses linguistic relativity. Within this chapter on linguistic relativity, there is a discussion of different ways in which two cross-linguistic systems might be “commensurate.” They might be translatable , understandable (though this is vaguely defined), commensurate in usage, share the same framing , and/or use the same organization of the various underlying concepts. In addition to a summary of the now classic Kay and Kempton ( 1984 ), there is an elaborate extension to linguistic relativity of semantics work in Mixtec and English by Brugman ( 1981 ) and Brugman and Macaulay ( 1986 ).

Metaphor is an obvious area of interest to many cognitive linguists (see Grady, this volume, chapter 8 , and references therein). The nature of metaphor is to consider conceptualizations in terms of other linguistically expressed domains. To the extent that source domains can vary cross-linguistically or cross-culturally (or different features of these source domains are mapped), this is an area ripe for linguistic relativity studies. To date, however, linguistic relativity studies—that is to say, work with behavioral data—have largely limited themselves to the study of elemental and literal language. One exception to this is linguistic relativity research on time, which almost necessarily is metaphorically expressed (see section 5.6 below).

5. Research by Topic Area

This section gives a brief overview of modern linguistic relativity work organized by topic area. While some comments are given, it is impossible in this space to summarize the findings of the entire body of work. Further, the empirical details of each study are essential to critical evaluation of the findings, so the original sources must be consulted.

Perhaps the greatest debate in linguistic relativity has been in the domain of color. Historically, linguists and anthropologists had been struck by the seemingly boundless diversity in color nomenclature. Given the obvious biological underpinnings of color perception, this made “color” a domain of choice to seek language-specific effects overriding biological prerequisites.

Lenneberg and Roberts ( 1956 ) is one of the earliest attempts to empirically test linguistic relativity, and as such this study spends considerable space defining the intellectual concerns before it reports on a relatively small study involving Zuni versus English color categorization. Brown and Lenneberg ( 1958 ) report on various work and develop the notion of codability : that is, the use of language as a way to more efficient coding of categories for the purposes not only of communication, but also of augmenting personal memory.

Berlin and Kay ( 1969 ) and the updated methodology in Kay and McDaniel ( 1978 ) have laid the groundwork of considerable research in color terminology. Central to the method is the use of Munsell color chips as a reference standard which can be carried to various field sites. Universal patterns were found to establish a typology of different color systems which appeared to be built out of a small set of universal principles. Research continues to be robust in this area and the interested reader may wish to consult the conference proceedings published as Hardin and Maffi ( 1997 ) for more current perspectives.

Eleanor Rosch (under her previous name: Heider 1971 , 1972 ) found that focal colors (or Hering primaries from Hering's theory of light and color, see Hering 1964 ) were better remembered even by young children and were also more perceptually salient for them. Further, Heider and Olivier ( 1972 ) and Rosch ( 1973 ) found that, even for members of a community (the Dani of Papua New Guinea) who had little color terminology at all, certain color examples were better remembered. She argues that these “natural” categories are generally favored in human learning and cognition. This work is often taken as support for universals of color perception, though since the Dani had no linguistic categories to sway them away from biologically primary colors, this cannot be taken as evidence against a potential linguistic influence on color perception.

The effects of language on color categorization could be seen in Kay and Kempton ( 1984 ), but any effects of language-specific color terms only surfaced under specific conditions, and the effects were not as robust as earlier researchers had hoped. Various proposals have been made to revise the Berlin and Kay approach in ways which accommodate linguistic relativity effects within a basically universally constrained system. Most notable of these is Vantage Theory, which seeks to explain multiple points of view—even within the putative universals of color perception—and how points of view may be linguistically mediated; see especially MacLaury ( 1991 , 1995 , 2000 ).

Work by Davies and colleagues has also expanded upon the work of Kay and Kempton ( 1984 ) by examining a variety of linguistic systems for denoting colors. They then test participants from these speech communities using various categorization tasks. For Turkish, see Oezgen and Davies ( 1998 ); for Setswana, English, and Russian, see Davies ( 1998 ), Davies and Corbett ( 1997 ), and Davies et al. ( 1998 ); see also Corbett and Davies ( 1997 ) for a discussion of method in language sampling for color terminology.

Especially within anthropology, there has been concern about the fundamental adequacy of the empirical method followed by Berlin and Kay (and later modifications). Jameson and DʼAndrade ( 1997 ) address the adequacy of the theory of color perception inherent in the use of the Munsell color system. Lucy ( 1997b ) criticizes most work on color terminology as insufficiently descriptive of the actual linguistic properties of the color terms themselves: without an adequate investigation into these properties, it is unclear what the effects may be of forcing reference with these terms into the Munsell system. The worry is that the Munsell system will not only standardize the coding of the responses, but actually create standardized and unnatural responses rather than allowing the terms to refer to their actual reference.

For a survey of recent work exploring color naming and its relationship to nonlinguistic cognition, see Kay and Regier ( 2006 ).

5.2. Shape Classification

In determining whether or not the Navajo shape classification system influenced sorting behavior, Carroll and Casagrande ( 1958 ) attempted to balance cultural factors across samples by using English-speaking and Navajo-speaking ethnic Navajo children. As a control group, English-speaking, middle-class American children were used. The results from triad classification (by either shape/function or color) were largely consistent with the Navajo verb classification, in that the Navajo-speaking Navajo children demonstrated a greater preference for shape sorting than English-speaking Navajo children. Note, however, that English-speaking middle-class children also patterned like Navajo-speaking children, suggesting to Carroll and Casagrande that cultural factors beyond language play an important role in such classification.

Lucy and Gaskins ( 2001 ) also use triad-type methods to compare Yucatecan children and adults with English-speaking Americans. Again, a broad consistency with each language's classification system is found, but interestingly, this only becomes prominent after age nine (see section 5.6 )

5.3. Conditional Reasoning

With basic reasoning processes, variation is more likely to be viewed as directly advantageous or disadvantageous, that is, essentially correct or incorrect. Whether the hypothesized cause is linguistic or otherwise, in modern academia, the burden of proof appropriately falls most heavily on the researcher hoping to demonstrate any potential absence (or “deficiency”) within a particular community.

The work of Alfred Bloom and his many detractors falls fully into this predicament. Bloom ( 1981 ) proposed that Chinese (unlike English) lacks a specific counterfactual construction and that this has led to reduced ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning. The debate was carried across several volumes of Cognition : Au ( 1983 , 1984 ), Bloom ( 1984 ), Liu ( 1985 ), Takano ( 1989 ); making use of different samples, these studies did not generally replicate Bloom's findings. 7 Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to interpret the various results (or lack thereof) as disconfirming linguistic relativity more generally rather than demonstrating a failure of a particular experimental design. Takano used Japanese speakers, who like Chinese speakers, lack a dedicated counterfactual construction, but found that their reasoning patterned like English speakers. More recently, Lardiere ( 1992 ) investigated Arabic speakers. Arabic patterns like English in that there is an explicit counterfactual construction, yet the Arabic participants performed like Bloom's original Chinese subjects on counterfactual reasoning. From these studies, both Takano and Lardiere conclude that the principal effect on counterfactual reasoning is traceable not to linguistic habit, but to cultural practices of reasoning, testing conventions, and the like.

Another conclusion one might draw from these studies is that we cannot automatically assume that either linguistic or nonlinguistic habit will be discern-able from the presence or absence of specialized linguistic constructions. Obviously, those Chinese and Japanese speakers trained in formal counterfactual reasoning must have found some means of expression. Conversely, the Arabic speakers need not have used their counterfactual construction in ways analogous to the ways of formally educated English speakers.

5.4. Number

Cardinal numbers.

One clear way in which languages vary is in their cardinal number systems. In addition to the obvious lack of larger numbers in many languages (at least as native vocabulary), languages also vary in their organization of these numbers. Various languages partially use a base twenty counting system and other languages appear to have relics of base five systems. But even within primarily base ten systems, there is variation of consistency and expression.

Miura ( 1987 ) argues that the generally superior mathematical abilities of school children in or from some cultures (especially East Asian) result at least in part from the transparency and exception-free nature of the base ten numerals used for counting, which children generally control prior to beginning formal education—see also the follow-up cross-linguistic studies: Miura and Okamoto ( 1989 ), Miura et al. ( 1988 ), Miura et al. ( 1993 ), Miura et al. ( 1994 ), Miura et al. ( 1999 ).

Saxton and Towse ( 1998 ) provide a more cautious conclusion, suggesting that the influence of native language on the task of learning place values is less than argued for by Miura and colleagues. Many other differences in performance were found across groups which were better accounted for as resulting from general cultural attitudes toward education and so on, than as the result of the linguistic number system.

Grammatical Number

On a grammatical level, languages vary in terms of their grammatical encoding of the number of entities in an event or scene. While this topic has not been widely taken up, the work of Lucy ( 1992a ) is noteworthy for its extensive consideration of attention to number in Mayan and English speakers. An extensive typological discussion of grammatical number, though without focus on issues of linguistic relativity, is provided by Corbett ( 2000 ). Lastly, Hill and Hill ( 1998 ) discuss the effects of culture on language (rather than linguistic relativity) for number marking (plurals), and in particular the “anti-Whorfian effect” they find in Uto-Aztecan.

Reference Frames

Currently, the primary area of linguistic relativity research in spatial domains is with reference frames (however, there is also the important developmental work on topological relations by Choi and Bowerman 1991 , see below).

Reference frames are the psychological or linguistic representation of relationships between entities in space. They require fixed points of reference, such as the speaker, a landmark, or an established direction. Within linguistics, the typology of reference frames is complicated, but most accounts include something like an intrinsic reference frame (whereby an object is located only with respect to an immediate point, e.g., The ball is next to the chair ) and various flavors of reference frames which make use of additional orientation (e.g., The ball is to my right of the chair or The ball is to the north of the chair ). Languages vary in terms of their habitually selected reference frames, and following the linguistic relativity hypothesis, speakers should also vary in their encoding spatial memories, making locational calculations, and so forth. For extensive work measuring event-related potential data (recordings at the scalp of electrical charges from brain activity during specific tasks), see the work of Taylor and colleagues: Taylor et al. ( 1999 ) and Taylor et al. ( 2001 ). These works compare the viewer/speaker-relative (or egocentric ) reference frame with the intrinsic.

Of note for being broadly comparative across diverse linguistic and cultural communities is the work reported in Pederson et al. ( 1998 ), which found correlations between habitual linguistic selection of reference frames and cognitive performance on spatial memory (and other) tasks. There were many studies within this same general project. Perhaps the most important to consult for the theoretical underpinnings for the project are Brown and Levinson ( 1993 ) and Levinson ( 1996 ). As pointed out by Li and Gleitman ( 2002 ), the populations reported as using an absolute/geo-cardinal ( north of …) reference frame were largely rural populations, and the populations using a speaker-relative/egocentric reference frame are largely urban, so there is a potential confound in the population samples between language and culture/environment. For a rebuttal to these concerns and Li and Gleitman's similar experiments, see Levinson et al. ( 2002 ); see also Pederson ( 1998 ) for a discussion of this urban/rural cultural split.

Motion Events

Talmy ( 1985 , 2000b ) identifies a typological contrast in the ways that languages encode basic motion events. To simplify, some languages such as the Romance languages commonly encode the fact of motion and the basic path with the main verb (e.g., to enter , to ascend , etc.). In contrast, Germanic and many other languages most commonly encode the fact of motion along with the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., to wiggle ), and the path is expressed elsewhere.

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

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Broadly, the belief that people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently, their worldviews being shaped or determined by the language of their culture (a notion rejected by social determinists and by realists). The stance is loosely derived from the theories of Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher Edward Sapir in the 1930s, though subsequent interpretations often bear little relation to their actual claims. In its most extreme version the hypothesis can be described as relating two associated principles: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativism. While few linguists would accept the hypothesis in its strong, extreme, or deterministic form, many now accept a weak, more moderate, or limited Whorfianism, namely that the ways in which we see the world may be influenced to some extent by the kind of language we use. See also mould theory.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/whorf.html The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

From:   Sapir-Whorf hypothesis   in  A Dictionary of Media and Communication »

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2.3: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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There has been extensive research on what is known for linguists as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Linguists and other social scientists,use this hypothesis to analyze the complex relations between language and culture. In short, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explains that language shapes or influences the culture in which it is spoken . 70 In other words, the languages we speak shape our social and cultural realities. So if we are speaking English, English (and all of the linguistic sexism found in it) would shape our cultural realities. Going by this hypothesis, one might argue labeling people as “female” or “male” shapes the idea of who the default individual would be. In that sense English can indeed be perceived as sexist, as it conveys intuitive notions that might shape the speaker’s and listener’s point of view. Take, for instance, the examples below:

In addition to language creating “defaults” in our standards for normalcy (and thereby creating deviations from those standards) we also create (or recreate) degradations of the female noun. For example, hound keeping its canine meaning, but bitch gaining another meaning entirely. Mistress and master used to be equal in meaning; now master evokes power, excellence, and ownership, whereas mistress is someone with whom you can cheat on your spouse. Incidentally, you cannot use master in the same way. Consider this old riddle that goes something like this: A father and son go out for a camping trip. On the way home from the camping trip the father and son get into a terrible car accident where the father is killed immediately upon impact. The son promptly gets rushed to the emergency room where the doctor inside prepares to save the boy’s life. Until, the doctor walks over to the critically injured boy and says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.’ This is the end of the riddle. The question then becomes; who is the doctor? If you are like many people you’ll be puzzled at first thinking, “Uh, but you said the father died. How could he be in the emergency room if he is dead?” To which, of course, he cannot be (though, I’ve heard variations on the ghost dad / zombie dad theme numerous times!). That leaves only one option: the boy’s mother is the doctor. “Ahhhhhh, duh!” Yes, duh. But why was this obvious answer not immediately apparent? The answer has to do with the theme of this section: language has ways of seeing and understanding the world built into it that both reflect and reconstruct our social structures through our use of them. Since the word ‘doctor’ connotes a position of power, it is often understood to be held by a man. Though we now know full well women can and are doctors, the cultural and linguistic vestige from the past, the legacy of the power in Western culture, predisposes us to thinking the doctor must be a man, blinding us from the obvious fact that most people have two parents (and often a mother and a father)!

So who do we blame? English, right? Grab the pitchforks! Not quite. We cannot blame language; linguistic sexism is abstract and draws on human experiences to give it shape and meaning. And yet there is something in our heads that associates feminine with ‘ pretty ’ and masculine with ‘ strong ’. While language isn’t to blame, language does reflect and reinforce the culture of its users. Us!

Is language sexist? Only as much as the user is. Is sexism linguistic? Not only linguistic, but yes, the evidence in grammar is enough to draw conclusions pointing to sexism. How can we fight linguistic sexism and sexist language? Language is a reflection of us and does not exist without us, and our realities are shaped by language. So it’s almost like looking in a mirror and becoming frustrated when the image won’t change without us changing it. We would have to reconstruct sexism in thought before we could eliminate sexism in speech . Then, eliminating it in speech would reinforce eliminating it in thought. (However, going back to the examples provide earlier on using inclusive language can help the process of reconstruction our thoughts on sexism and gender standards.)

70 Deutscher, G. (2011). Through the language glass. Why the world looks different in other languages , Arrow Books, London

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LIL : Language and Thought; the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or Linguistic Relativity , is an extremely controversial concept  which explains how language affects the way we think and perceive reality. It is often defined to include two “versions,” strong and weak. The strong version of the hypothesis claims that language determines thought, and that linguistic categories both limit and determine cognitive categories. In other words, the language we speak completely controls the way we think and perceive reality. The weak version claims that linguistic categories and usage can only influence thought and decisions, and do not determine them. In other words, language guides the way we think and perceive reality, but does not have enough power to “drive” them.

Linguists commonly agree that the use of the term “hypothesis” is inaccurate in this case for two reasons. The first being the fact that Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, the two linguistists that the hypothesis is named after, never co-authored anything or stated these ideas in such a form. The second reason is that this “hypothesis” cannot be tested or  using the scientific method. Regardless, it is still popularly referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

The idea of Linguistic Relativity is not new; it was first clearly expressed in the 1800s by thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt , who saw language as “the expression of the spirit of a nation.” In the early 20th century, the School of American Anthropology headed by Frank Boas and Edward Sapir also explored these ideas, but Sapir in particular opposed the idea of linguistic determinism (the idea that language limits and determines human knowledge and thought). Sapir’s student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, is seen as the primary proponent of this idea, publishing observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in cognition and behavior. Cognitive Linguistic researchers such as Lera Boroditsky have made refinements to the “hypothesis,” claiming that language’s influence on thought is far more limited than the earlier broad claims made by Whorf and his colleagues. However, examples such as Boas’ study of the Eskimo words for snow and Whorf’s study of the Hopi conception of time still demonstrate some sort of linguistic influence on thought.

How is this idea perceived today, and what are some arguments for and against it?

One popular argument in support of this is the perception of time. Language structures differ immensely in so far as how reality and time is organized; there are “futured” languages, “futureless” languages, languages that have no tenses and 1 verb form (Chinese), 17 tenses and 5 verb forms (Spanish) and even a language (Archi) that has an astounding 1,502,839 verbal forms. That’s about 25472 forms for every one that we have (geez!). All of these structural differences, linguistic relativity argues, may be shaping the way we perceive and act in reality. [To read more about Archi’s complex morphology, click here ]

In English, French and Spanish for example, there are specific tenses to indicate whether an action is occurring in the future, the present, the past, the distant past, etc. More interesting perhaps is the specific vocabulary used to describe each of these tenses. English, for example, uses terms relating time to distance. We say “That was a short break,” or “You were gone for a long time.” In both examples, time is expressed as a measurable distance which some argue leads to a more precise perception of time. In contrast, languages like Spanish use terms relating to volume. We would say “Un descanso pequeño ” (literally, a small break) or “Un gran descanso” (a big or large break).

These differences in the perception of time have a lot of interesting effects on how we perceive reality, and by extension how we act in it. In a 2012 Ted Talk , Keith Chen , a behavioral economist and Associate Professor of Economics at UCLA, presented a hypothesis on language’s effect on financial and savings habits. Specifically, he compared the savings behaviors of speakers of both futured and futureless languages, looking to see if how a language talks about and forces its speakers to think about time effects how much that speaker saves. Comparing these speakers after controlling for variables (country of birth / residence, demographics, income, education, etc.), Chen found that speakers of futureless languages are 30% more likely to save in any year, and are likely to retire with 25% more in savings.

Those against the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis argue that language is a reflection of thought, not the opposite. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist and author, stated in 1995 that “when people think about spring they are not confused as to whether they are thinking about a season or something that goes boing. And if one word can correspond to two thoughts, thoughts cannot be words.” George Steiner in his book After Babel views the argument as fundamentally circular, claiming that “we argue that psychological differences give rise to linguistic differences, and we use linguistic differences to argue psychological differences.”

Linguists and Linguistic Anthropologists have generally backed away from asserting the strong form of this “hypothesis” (linguistic determinism), that linguistic habits completely determine a person’s worldview and ideas. They do, however – and demonstrably so – have an influence. The question of how much of an influence still remains unanswered.

Do you agree or disagree with this hypothesis? What other examples might there be of language affecting our perception of reality? How is this hypothesis evident in everyday life? Discuss in the comments below, and check back next week for a new edition of Links Interpreters Love.

-Written by William Cerkoney

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The Whorf Hypothesis

The basic idea, theory, meet practice.

TDL is an applied research consultancy. In our work, we leverage the insights of diverse fields—from psychology and economics to machine learning and behavioral data science—to sculpt targeted solutions to nuanced problems.

If you’ve spent any amount of time online, you might have seen an article titled along the lines of “10 words we wish we had in English” – even major outlets like the  BBC 1  and  The Guardian 2  have indulged! The format is simple. The article lists 10 words, like  sobremesa  (Spanish for when you stay chatting in a restaurant for too long) or  kummerspeck  (German for the weight gain from emotional eating), and probably a few relatable, witty remarks. The article usually ends by mourning the lack of English translation.

As behavioral scientists, we might think to ask: Are there  really  untranslatable words? Are there certain thoughts you can only have in certain languages?

The “Whorf Hypothesis” (also known as the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” or “Linguistic Relativism”) is an umbrella term for the claim that the language you speak determines or influences what you can think. If you speak English, there are certain thoughts you can have; if you speak Spanish or German, there are different thoughts you can have. Certain words are untranslatable because only certain languages can convey those thoughts.

Does the language we speak shape or determine what we can think? What is the relationship between language and thought?

The Strong Whorf Hypothesis : the claim that the language you speak determines which thoughts you can have.3 It is generally rejected by most linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists today .4,5, 6

The Weak Whorf Hypothesis : the claim that the language you speak  influences , but does not determine, which thoughts you can have. 3  This is a claim currently being studied, and many behavioral scientists believe some form of it. 5,7,8

Nativism: The claim that language is largely an innate cognitive faculty, virtually identical across individuals and cultures. Versions of this claim have been defended by linguists like Noam Chomsky, 9  psychologists like Steven Pinker, 6  and philosophers like Jerry Fodor. 10

While some scholars argue that the Whorf hypothesis dates back to Aristotle’s  Rhetoric  or to German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz’s writings on language, we can safely start with Wilhelm von Humboldt, 11  an early 19th-century German linguist and political theorist. Before and during his fieldwork, Humboldt often wrote about the relationship between language and thought. To him, language was not merely the means through which we conveyed what was going on in our minds. Instead, the language established a worldview: languages were the means through which we understood ourselves and the world. 11

Humboldt’s ideas became influential in the late-19th century through the work of the German-trained Franz Boas: 11  a professor at Columbia and founder of the American Anthropological Association. 12  Boas’s work in linguistic anthropology (mainly on what we now call “Inuit languages”) followed Humboldt in arguing that different languages classify how we experience the world in different, subconscious ways. 11,13  Crucially, though, he did not think that language  determines  how we view the world. Instead, he thought that our languages’ grammatical categories  reflect  the ways our  culture  classifies the world. 13

Moving on to the early 20th century, one of Boas’s own students, Edward Sapir, would also be one of the main contributors to the development of the Whorf hypothesis. (This is why it is sometimes called the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis.) Sapir followed Boas in arguing that different languages classify how we experience the world, but he stressed that languages are complete systems, often untranslatable between each other. 13  He also pushed further than Boas: he thought that language was necessary for us to fully develop the ability to think because our ability to think arises from our ability to interpret the language we speak. 13  Different languages yield different interpretations, and those different interpretations place constraints on what we can think. 13

This progressive strengthening of Humboldt’s original idea was finalized by one of Sapir’s students, Benjamin Lee Whorf. 11 13  While not a professional linguist, Whorf was interested in documenting previous and current forms of the indigenous languages of North America, especially Nahuatl and Hopi. Whorf’s main contribution to the hypothesis was to point out that not all linguistic categories are overt; sometimes, a language encodes information  implicitly . Whorf also accepted Sapir’s claim that languages place constraints on what we can think, based on the interpretations we give them. But because languages also marked things implicitly, these interpretations were widespread and pervasive — we didn’t have to actively use our language for us to be interpreting things  through  our language. As Whorf would put it:

“[…]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.” 15

In the 1960s and onwards, with the rise of nativism in linguistics — especially Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar — the Whorf hypothesis began to come under scrutiny.  It was believed that languages were just too similar to yield the kinds of effects on the thought that Sapir and Whorf hypothesized. Further empirical work also showed that the Whorf hypothesis, in its strong form, was shown to be flawed: humans and other primates display the ability to think  without  language 5 , refuting Sapir and Whorf’s claim that we needed to interpret the language to be able to think.

However, researchers in the 1990s started studying whether language still influenced thought in any interesting ways. Among other things, behavioral scientists began looking at language’s effect on color perception, spatial cognition, and more.  Many studies suggest that language does have some effect on which kinds of processing are  easier  for a speaker.16, 17 The research on these weaker versions of the Whorf hypothesis is still ongoing, but many behavioral scientists— even ones who reject the stronger forms— accept one version or another. 14

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 – 1835) was a philosopher and political theorist who made great contributions to philosophy, linguistics, education, anthropology, and more. 18  Many theorists on language (including Boas, Sapir, Whorf, and, paradoxically enough, Chomksy) claim to have been influenced by his views. 18  In particular, Humboldt is often credited with arguing that a language’s grammar is best studied by looking at the forms and procedures it uses to generate actual speech, and for arguing that thought without language is impossible. 18

Franz Boas (1858 – 1942) is usually credited as the founder of the American anthropological tradition, and he is the founder of the American Anthropological Association. 19  His work focused on the indigenous languages in the United States, where he contributed to both our anthropological and linguistic understanding of them. 19  Additionally, Boas was also among the first white social scientists who argued that racial differences were due to historical events, not genetics; and that racial categories were themselves culturally constructed. 19

Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir (1884 – 1939) is often considered one of the most important figures in linguistics and anthropology in the United States. 20  He was the founder of “ethnolinguistics,” which focused on the relationship between language and culture, and he is often credited as a key developer of American structural linguistics. 20  His work focused on the indigenous languages of all of North America. 20

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897 – 1941) was an American linguist whose work, like that of his mentor Edward Sapir, focused on the indigenous languages of North America. 21  Whorf is most well-known due to his arguments in favor of linguistic relativity (which came to be known as “the Whorf hypothesis”), based on his work on Hopi and other indigenous languages. 21

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (1928 – current) is an American linguist, political theorist, and cognitive scientist. 21  Chomsky’s 1959 review of B.F. Skinner’s  Verbal Behavior  is often credited as the moment of death for  behaviorism. 21  Starting from the 60s and onward, Chomsky founded and contributed to the Generativist approach to linguistics, which holds that language is a separate cognitive faculty unique to humans, which children are born with and use to acquire their native language without much stimulus.21 He also argues that this linguistic faculty is universal: all humans are born with the same “Universal Grammar,” which allows them to learn language quickly and makes all human languages the same at bottom. 21  This approach to language remains standard and influential to this day, especially in theoretical syntax and semantics. 8,22

Consequences

If true, the strong form of the Whorf hypothesis would have massive ripple effects on our understanding of how the human mind works. If the language we spoke determined the kinds of thoughts we could have, it would be incredibly hard to find any cognitive universals. Our world speaks over 6500 languages, so the strong Whorf hypothesis predicts that we would have radically different— and untranslatable— thoughts.

Thankfully for cognitive scientists worldwide, the strong form of the Whorf hypothesis has been falsified for decades. However, we might still ask: what about the consequences of the weak form?

The research is still ongoing, but one general trend is that the language we speak makes certain thoughts  slightly   easier  to access in non-trivial ways. For instance, if our language marks space using the cardinal directions (e.g., “the office is north of the coffee shop”) it would make it easier for us to  think  in terms of north and south. 16   If, in contrast, our language marks space using speaker-focused directions (e.g., “the office is to my left”), it makes it easier for us to think in terms of left and right. 16

Controversies

The Whorf hypothesis cuts at the core of what linguists, psychologists, and behavioral scientists in general want to know about language. So, it should be no surprise that it has been the topic of much (very passionate) debate in a great number of topics.

While we cannot take a stand on which side is right, we can walk through some of the research in one topic of debate: the linguistic relativity (or lack thereof) of color categories. Color categories are a natural place to look for language’s effect on a thought because there is nothing in the physics of light that requires us to draw the color boundaries at one place or another; we can split up the wavelengths in any way we would like. 15  Furthermore, it’s a fact that different languages mark color boundaries differently. English marks “light blue” and “dark blue” as one color, whereas Spanish distinguishes between “celeste” and “azul.” If the strong Whorf hypothesis were true, we would expect speakers of different languages to literally perceive colors differently, in accordance with their specific language’s boundaries. If the weak Whorf hypothesis were true, we would expect to see some linguistic influence of color perception.

In the 70s, many researchers argued that universals in color categories and perception across different languages falsified both versions of the Whorf hypothesis. For example, Eleanor Hedier’s study from 1972 found that there was no difference in how speakers from languages with different color categories could memorize “focal”, or easily rememberable, colors. 23  Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s work in the 60s and 70s found that, while different languages have different color categories, these color categories all follow the same patterns: they come from 11 universal categories, and they follow the same historical progression. 24   These results greatly contradict any strong version of the Whorf hypothesis: it seems as though speakers of different languages perceive colors the same way, and that languages might not differ much in how they categorize color at all!

However, recent work has come to the defense of the weak form of the Whorf hypothesis. For instance, a landmark study done by researcher Johnathan Winawer and his colleagues in 2007 found that Russian speakers are significantly faster than English speakers at discriminating particular shades of blue. The Russian language, like Spanish, marks lighter shades of “blue” and darker shades of “blue” as different color categories. 17  As it turns out, when tasked with discriminating between these sorts of shades of blue, Russian speakers were able to discriminate between them faster than English speakers. 17  More importantly, when Winawer and his coauthors inserted a verbal interference—  such as asking speakers to memorize a series of numbers  and  discriminate between different colors — the difference  went away . 17  This suggests that Russian speakers are faster at discriminating between these shades of blue  because  they speak Russian. 17

We all know those good decisions are often future-oriented. We save money  now  so we can have a better retirement  later . We exercise  now  so we are healthier  long-term .  But can the language we speak influence how prone we are to make future-oriented decisions?

According to Economist M. Keith Chen’s 2013 study titled “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets,” the answer seems to be “yes”. In this study, Chen studied the future-oriented decisions of English-speakers and German-speakers. English requires speakers to mark the future tense in a way that German does not. To say something about the future, English requires us to add the word “will.” 24  For example, to turn “it rains” into the future tense, we say “it will rain.” German, in contrast, does not require an additional word: present tense “Morgen regnet es” means “it rains  tomorrow,”  allowing German speakers to communicate about the future in the present tense. 25

Chen’s hypothesis was that this difference in whether a language marks the future through its own grammatical category could lead to a difference in decision-making.25 If a language forces speakers to separate the present from the future— like English does— speakers might be influenced into thinking of the future as more distant, making them less prone to make future-oriented decisions. 20  In contrast, if speakers are not forced to grammatically mark the difference between the present and the future— like German does—speakers might see the future as closer to the present, making them  more  prone to make future decisions. 25

Surprisingly, the hypothesis was borne out: German speakers were more likely to save, exercise, etc. than English speakers. 25  Even more shockingly, this effect doesn’t seem to be only correlated with a cultural or institutional difference between English-speaking countries and German-speaking countries.25 What Chen found is that language and culture can influence decision-making independently: people can be influenced into more future-oriented decisions  either  by the society they live in or by the language they speak. 25

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• Special Words That Don’t Exist in English (Yet). (2018).  BBC News .  https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-45685575
• 10 of the Best Words in the World (That Don’t Translate Into English). (2018).  The Guardian .  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/27/10-of-the-best-words-in-the-world-that-dont-translate-into-english
• Scholz, B. C., Pelletier, F. J., & Pullum, G. K. (2020). Philosophy of Linguistics.In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Summer2020). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
• Boutonnet, B., Dering, B., Viñas-Guasch, N., & Thierry, G. (2013). Seeing Objects through the Language Glass.  Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ,  25 (10), 1702–1710.  https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00415
• Pinker, S. (2010).  The language instinct: How the mind creates language  (Nachdr.). Harper Perennial.
• Lucy, J. A. (1992).  Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis . Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620843
• Lupyan, G. (2012). Linguistically Modulated Perception and Cognition: The Label-Feedback Hypothesis.  Frontiers in Psychology ,  3 .  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00054 .
• Chomsky, N., & Smith, N. (2000).  New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind  (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press.  https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511811937
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About the Authors

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.

Mental Models

Automatic Thinking

Human-Computer Interaction

Gestalt principles.

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