Linguistic relativism

Linguistic relativism is the idea that language shapes thought and experience. i.e. differences in language lead to differences in the way one understands the world around him or her. It is an idea inferred from Linguistic determinism, and subject in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

History

apir-Whorf

Linguistic relativism began as a question posed by Franz Boas in the 1900s, with his work with the Inuit tribe. Could a culture’s evolution be described with the evolution of their own language? Furthermore, could language be used as a tool to describe the difference between cultures? Boas’s work was continued by Edward Sapir, a student of his and also the later mentor to Benjamin Whorf. This is when linguistic relativism became popularized through the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Whorf was not always interested in the field of linguistics. He was originally a mechanical engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later took the job of ‘fire prevention engineer’. He first became interested in linguistics at his workplace. He noticed that workers would behave more cautiously if asked to move ‘full’ fuel drums, and carelessly around ‘empty’ fuel drums. However the term ‘empty’ implied that it was simply out of fuel, not that there weren’t still gasoline vapors lingering in the drums.

Later in life, Whorf studied the Hopi Indians of Arizona. He noticed there were distinct differences between English and Hopi languages. Western culture puts a heavy emphasis on time and discrete time intervals, like a camera. Whereas Hopi seems to reference an event or happening, much like a story. Hopi also makes no distinction of time in verb tenses; ‘has happened’, ‘is happening’, ‘will happen’ are all one word.

Modern theory

Present day Linguistic relativists continue to explain differences in culture through language. Present day theorists include John Lucy [Lucy, John Arthur. "Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis". Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. press, 1992. & Lucy, John Arthur. "Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis". Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1992.] and his study of the Yucatec Mayan language and Boroditsky's study of Mandarin Chinese. Whereas earlier lingustic relativists had put an emphasis on vocabulary to explain differences in culture (Intuit words for snow, Dani color matching), modern linguists tend to study sentence structure or word placement.
The theory has also been revived with studies by Stephen Levinson at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). [Gumperz, John Joseph, and Stephen C Levinson, ed. "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.] Important contribution to the evolution in this field is the work of Alison Gopnick, who adopts version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis "without wincing" as she puts it. Her work is also known under the name of "the theory theory". This theory also challenges Chomsky's approach of innatennes. [A. Gopnik (1998). Theories, language and culture: Whorf without wincing. In M. Bowerman and S. Levinson (eds.) "Conceptual development and language acquisition". New York: Cambridge University Press.
A. Gopnik (2003). The theory theory as an alternative to the innateness hypothesis. In L. Antony and N. Hornstein (eds.) "Chomsky and his critics". Blackwells, Oxford. PDF paper available there [http://ihd.berkeley.edu/gopnik.htm] ]

Criticism

While Linguistic relativism is recognized in linguistics, it is merely a hypothesis and is not widely accepted. [It is accepted to varying degrees. Clearly the strong version, that language determines thought, cannot be substantiated.]

Eskimo vocabulary hoax

In a 1940 article, Whorf said Eskimo languages had about 7 different words for snow, because of the constant exposure to snow and snowfall conditions and the utility role it played in their culture. Whorf had expanded on this idea by his predecessor Franz Boas. This number was inflated in further studies, until a recent study moved to discredit the myth and its relation to Linguistic relativism explaining the much smaller number of words shared by the Eskimo tribes was about the same as its English speaking counter parts. [However, it is true that people who need to speak of many fine distinctions will have more vocabulary to do so than people who do not have that need. Thus, even in English, we can see a similar difference, depending on where people live. In Southern California, one hears such precipitation terms as "rain, mist, hail, fog, smog" and, rarely, "snow." In East Texas, where the weather is more extreme, one hears all of the above, but also "freezing rain, drizzle, thunderstorm, lightning storm, wall cloud, haze," a series of descriptions of hail based on the size of the precipitation ("golf-ball size," "baseball-size," etc.), and a series of words to describe the severity of thunderstorms that may have accompanying tornadoes -- thunderstorm watch vs. thunderstorm warning, for example. Similarly, cattle ranchers have many more words to describe cattle of different sexes and ages than the average English speaker, to whom the animals are all "cows." The Eskimo, by the way, are Inuit, not Intuit.]

Color cognition

In the 1970s, Eleanor Rosch held a study between Dani and American participants to play a color memory-matching game which included 40 colors. The Dani language was limited to the simplest categories for color, light and dark. The participants were shown a color, and then 30 seconds later asked to choose from a list of colors. The scores between both cultures’ participants were similar, and both groups seemed to make the same type of errors, showing more of a physiological error than a cultural, linguistic error. This contradicted a study a few years earlier by Berlin and Kay, Whorfists believed the more evolved English language would effect participant's cognition as well. [However, a later study by Paul Kay and Willet Kempton (1984) compared speakers of English with speakers of Tarahumara, an Uto-Aztecan language of Mexico, which has a single color word for what we call "blue" and "green" (hereinafter referred to as "grue"). When subject were asked to say which of 3 similarly colored chips was most different, the Tarahumara speakers, who used a single word to describe the color of all 3 chips, were able to identify the chip as most different the one which actually was most different (measured by discrimination difference). English speakers almost invariably overruled the evidence of their senses and chose as most different the chip whose color fell into the doman of a different word. This supports the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Another experiment, oddly enough, failed to support the hypothesis, though. Where the discrimination differences were exactly equal, the Tarahumara speakers regularly chose the odd one across the lexical boundary of English, a language they did not know! The researchers explained this by noting that people communicate with standardized phrases as well as single words. Thus, there were fixed phrases that we would translate as "grue like the sky" and "grue like the leaves." These served the cognitive function of our single words "blue" and "green" evidently. (Kay, Paul & Willett Kempton. 1984. "What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?" Am. Anth. Assoc.86:65-79.)

External links

*http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.html
*http://www.russian.pomona.edu/harves/LucyREVIEWONLinguisticRela.pdf
*http://www.unc.edu/~jdumas/projects/languagethought.htm

ee also

*relativism
*Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

References