thesis on linguistic relativity

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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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

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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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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.

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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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Home > Honors Program > Thesis > 451

Honors Thesis

Strong Linguistic Relativity: A Continental Sense of Language and Being

Ava Totah Follow Brian Treanor , Loyola Marymount University

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Degree type.

Philosophy (PHIL)

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Brian Treanor

The theory of linguistic relativity can be divided into two hypotheses: the strong argument and the weak argument. The strong argument, often called linguistic determinism, posits that one’s native language determines one’s thought in an inescapable manner. The so-called “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” demonstrates this, though many modern linguists now believe this principle – and linguistic determinism in general – to be implausible. The weak argument for linguistic relativity states that one’s native language merely influences their worldview, such that it struggles to maintain a connection that is more than trivial. In this work, I seek a “third option” that is both a) plausible and b) non-trivial, such that it mediates these two hypotheses; I term this third option “strong linguistic relativity.” Through an analysis of the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Martin Heidegger, I argue that modern hermeneutics and phenomenology lend themselves to strong linguistic relativity because they suggest that one’s native language influences one’s being-in-the-world in at least some non-trivial ways.

Recommended Citation

Totah, Ava and Treanor, Brian, "Strong Linguistic Relativity: A Continental Sense of Language and Being" (2022). Honors Thesis . 451. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/honors-thesis/451

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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Linguistic Theory

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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the  linguistic theory that the semantic structure of a language shapes or limits the ways in which a speaker forms conceptions of the world. It came about in 1929. The theory is named after the American anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and his student Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941). It is also known as the   theory of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativism, linguistic determinism, Whorfian hypothesis , and Whorfianism .

History of the Theory

The idea that a person's native language determines how he or she thinks was popular among behaviorists of the 1930s and on until cognitive psychology theories came about, beginning in the 1950s and increasing in influence in the 1960s. (Behaviorism taught that behavior is a result of external conditioning and doesn't take feelings, emotions, and thoughts into account as affecting behavior. Cognitive psychology studies mental processes such as creative thinking, problem-solving, and attention.)

Author Lera Boroditsky gave some background on ideas about the connections between languages and thought:

"The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that 'to have a second language is to have a second soul.' But the idea went out of favor with scientists when  Noam Chomsky 's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a  universal grammar  for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways...." ("Lost in Translation." "The Wall Street Journal," July 30, 2010)

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was taught in courses through the early 1970s and had become widely accepted as truth, but then it fell out of favor. By the 1990s, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was left for dead, author Steven Pinker wrote. "The cognitive revolution in psychology, which made the study of pure thought possible, and a number of studies showing meager effects of language on concepts, appeared to kill the concept in the 1990s... But recently it has been resurrected, and 'neo-Whorfianism' is now an active research topic in  psycholinguistics ." ("The Stuff of Thought. "Viking, 2007)

Neo-Whorfianism is essentially a weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and says that language  influences  a speaker's view of the world but does not inescapably determine it.

The Theory's Flaws

One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stems from the idea that if a person's language has no word for a particular concept, then that person would not be able to understand that concept, which is untrue. Language doesn't necessarily control humans' ability to reason or have an emotional response to something or some idea. For example, take the German word  sturmfrei , which essentially is the feeling when you have the whole house to yourself because your parents or roommates are away. Just because English doesn't have a single word for the idea doesn't mean that Americans can't understand the concept.

There's also the "chicken and egg" problem with the theory. "Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs," Boroditsky continued. "Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around."

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29 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: 09 July 2015
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Linguistic relativity studies investigate effects of one’s native or habitual language patterns on non-linguistic cognitive processes. Many of these studies have fallen outside of the mainstream research paradigms. This chapter surveys the last fifty years of research in the topic and discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges facing such research.

29.1 Introduction

This chapter presents not a linguistic theory or model but a body of research falling under the cover term linguistic relativity . Most generally, linguistic relativity studies investigate possible effects of natural language on purportedly non-linguistic cognition. For example, a linguistic relativity study might look to see whether speakers of a language which uses obligatory plural marking are more prone to remember numbers of objects in a visual display than speakers of a language which seldom marks plurality (cf. Lucy 1992 a ).

While linguistic relativity is defined here as a domain of research (much like morphology or syntax), much of the work in this area is rather ideological in tone and argument both for and against the possibility of an effect of language on cognition. Proponents of linguistic relativity generally express a faith that language effects on cognition are likely broad and important however difficult this may be to demonstrate. Opponents of linguistic relativity generally express great skepticism that language is likely to have much causal role in non-linguistic behavior and tend to seize on any specific failures to clearly demonstrate a specific language effect on cognition as indicative of a general lack of such effects. Both sides of the debate appeal to broad theoretical assumptions within linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science in general for a philosophical underpinning of their positions. As a result, those working to discover any linguistic relativity effects are not unlike scholars working within a particular and controversial model of language.

Just as collections of authors are often bundled together in a volume presenting work within a single theoretical model, so too, do we find books sharing a common interest in exploring linguistic relativity as an empirical question. See especially the collections by often allied researchers in Gumperz and Levinson (1996 a ); Pütz and Verspoor (2000) ; and Gentner and Goldin-Meadow (2003) .

29.2 Historical Background

Following the work of Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf popularized the idea of linguistic relativity in the mid-20th century. From this, linguistic relativity is often termed the “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis”. This is somewhat of a misnomer for a number of reasons. One obvious problem is that many people have speculated on the effects of language on cognition in addition to Sapir and Whorf. Further, Whorf’s writings on the topic were essentially written independently from Sapir, so the “Sapir– Whorf hypothesis” is not actually a joint statement put forward by these two. Further-more, many popular conceptions of “Whorfianism” actually differ from Whorf’s own speculations—see Smith (1996) for a discussion. More fundamentally, the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis is not a genuine hypothesis. In science, a hypothesis is a specific claim formulated for empirical testing. One might have a hypothesis that native speakers of a particular language with a particular obligatory feature will be more sensitive to a corresponding feature in the environment or more likely to encode that feature in memory. On the other hand, a general statement that “language substantially influences thought” fails to be a falsifiable hypothesis.

There are nearly as many summaries of the history of linguistic relativity as there are articles describing original research in this area. For a general overview with particular sensitivity to cultural concerns, see Hill and Mannheim (1992) and Lucy (1996 , 1997 ). For a historical overview of Whorf’s work and its relationship to modern work in linguistic relativity, see Lucy (1992 b ) , Smith (1996) , and Lee (1996 , 2000 ). For a focus on the relationship of linguistic relativity to Cognitive Linguistics with particular concerns about methods, see Pederson (2007) .

Historically, much of the debate about linguistic relativity has centered on a broadly imputed “strong vs. weak hypothesis”. Certainly this is how the topic has been typically and cursorily treated in psychology textbooks. The alleged strong hypothesis states that language has a deterministic effect on the categories of cognition. Namely, the linguistic categories we learn as children lock us into congruent categories of thought. Given that people can successfully learn new second languages throughout their lives and indeed learn ways of thinking which were previously ineffable, the “strong” version is taken to be patently false. The “weak” version of the hypothesis states that there is an influence of linguistic categories in other areas of cognition. Work by Loftus and colleagues ( Loftus and Palmer 1974 ; Loftus 1975 ) and more recently Lindquist and colleagues ( Lindquist et al. 2006 ) studies the effects of immediate vocabulary choice on perception and memory within a single language. These studies amply demonstrate the power of language to influence non-linguistic cognition. Certainly good trial lawyers and authors know to manipulate lexical and constructional choice to their advantage. Such examples are taken to be true but trivial. That is, there is support for a “weak” version of linguistic relativity but this weak version is generally taken to be less interesting to cognitive science.

In short, the dichotomization of linguistic relativity concerns into a patently false strong position and a trivially true weak position only serves to reduce interest in the topic as a whole. Much of the work in modern linguistic relativity studies tries to avoid such broad oversimplification in favor of a more detailed model of language and cognition.

29.3 Requirements for Linguistic Relativity Research

Clearly, it is no simple matter to determine what, if any effect, speakers’ native languages have on their conceptualization of the world or on their cognitive patterns. Above all else, research in linguistic relativity requires considerable breadth of expertise (or co-operation among an interdisciplinary team of researchers). A description of the relevant features of at least two languages must be adequate to withstand the scrutiny of linguists working both with that language and in the domain under investigation (semantics/morphology/etc.). Further, it is not enough to observe that a language has a particular feature (e.g., obligatory plural marking or a morphological evidential system). The language description must also be sufficiently exhaustive to know to what extent certain concepts may be expressed and under what conditions (e.g., is there an optional plural marker and when is it used).

To this language expertise must be added adequate behavioral experimentation to determine patterns of cognition in different populations. This must be up to the standards of psychological research and may need to be conducted with population samples far from the usual laboratory setting. It can be quite challenging enough for psychologists to manage sufficient rigor in cross-cultural work; for anthropologists and linguists to satisfy a critical audience of psychologists may be especially difficult.

Contrasting with these challenging research parameters is the popular appeal of linguistic relativity. The lay public can be counted on to have an opinion on the topic (typically that language does affect patterns of thinking). This is scarcely surprising. To many non-linguists, it is self-evident that the purpose of language is to represent the world and that there are likely to be interesting variations in the ways in which languages do this. For example, bilingual speakers commonly report the subjective experience of “thinking differently” in their alternate languages. Unfortunately, it is perhaps impossible to evaluate precisely such statements.

In stark contrast to this common view, the modern fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics have been largely concerned with the purported universals of language. Further, most linguists scarcely concern themselves with semantics at all. The relatively few semanticists among them in turn typically eschew cross-linguistic comparison in favor of formalized descriptions relying critically on their own native speaker intuitions. The field of linguistics has long rewarded sophisticated theory development (most easily elaborated from work with better-known languages) far more than fieldwork-based description.

Semantics has long been one of the less empirical branches within linguistics. Linguistics has long provided excellent training for phonetics and structural analysis, but has a striking dearth of empirical methods for semantic description. So it is scarcely surprising that a typical descriptive grammar of a less-described language will give little attention to semantics. Semantic comparison across even moderately well-described languages largely relies on simple glossing conventions and dictionaries listing approximate translation equivalents. As a result, accurate cross-linguistic semantic descriptions are seldom available.

The first and most fundamental step in a linguistic relativity study must be to have an adequate description of the language categories of at least two appropriately distinct varieties of language. Failure to achieve this means that at best positive results will be open to multiple interpretations and at worst there will be no interpretable results at all from a failure to appropriately formulate a specific linguistic relativity hypothesis for testing. For instance, Loucks and Pederson (2014) argue that the lack of an adequate and appropriate linguistic description has precluded meaningful results in research on the categorization of motion events.

To create a linguistic description for linguistic relativity research, careful fieldwork with the languages must have been conducted. Existing semantic descriptions should generally be assumed inadequate or inaccurate. If one is interested in how habitual language patterns affect thought, then data about habitual language use must be collected rather than relying on grammatical treatises or dictionaries. For this, recordings of native speaker discussions concerning the domain in question should be collected and analyzed. Which aspects of what could be described are routinely selected for expression and which seem to be relatively ignored? Relying on extant recordings or transcripts is problematic. Since the goal is cross-linguistic comparison, it is best to rely on cross-linguistic data which derives from the same context repeated across speech communities. Early examples of such standardized cross-linguistic comparison can be found for child language in the “Frog story” paradigm ( Berman and Slobin 1994 ) and much of this research ultimately led to discussions of motion event cognition (see section 29.7 , below). For adult language the “Pear film” ( Chafe 1980 ) has been widely used for elicitation of narratives in many language communities all speaking about the same sequence of events. Pederson et al. (1998) describe a method for eliciting and comparing very specific spatial systems across languages with the intended purpose of developing subsequent cognitive testing. While not immediately connected with cognitive testing, Bohnemeyer et al. (2007) use a similar research technique for developing a typology of motion event descriptions.

29.4 Linguistic Relativity and Mainstream Linguistics

As linguistics and psychology joined forces in the cognitive sciences during the 1980s, there was a particular interest in determining what is universal to human cognition. Linguistics had already been greatly influenced by the “Chomskyan paradigm”, which sought to determine those native elements which are unique and necessary to any human language. Generally speaking, variation was theoretically interesting only insofar as it instantiated general universal principles. Over the years, the Chomskyan approach has been forced to reduce the number of features believed to be universal and unique to the human language faculty until the we reach the position in Hauser et al. (2002) . In this controversial view, the only known feature remaining to uniquely structured language is an ill-defined “recursion” or a rule’s ability to refer to itself iteratively. For a passionate argument against the dominance of universalist/nativist approaches to language categories, see Levinson (2003 a ) . For arguments specifically confronting Hauser et al. (2002) , see Jackendoff and Pinker (2005 b ) and Bickerton (2009) among others.

Consistent with this universalist paradigm was the faith that language processing was essentially modular. That is, the processes of language production and comprehension were assumed to be essentially neurologically (that is, architecturally) autonomous from other cognitive processes—with the necessary exception of the input to and output from the language module. Neuroimaging and brain damage research during this period was often cited as supporting this view that language processing is largely autonomous from other brain processes. Thus, in the absence of clear evidence supporting linguistic relativity, it was simple enough to dismiss language—especially those aspects of language which are variable across languages—as having little influence on the rest of brain functioning.

There are a number of problems with such a view, however. Perhaps the most troubling is that the lack of empirical evidence for linguistic relativity effects may well have been simply due to a limited number of studies which had investigated the topic. As for the purported modularity of language—an autonomy from other brain processes—the picture even today is far less clear than one might hope. For all of their wonder, neuroimaging studies are still notably crude tools relative to the sophistication of their subject. Further, while there is some neuroanatomy which does indeed seem most architecturally dedicated to language processes, it is associated with fairly automatic processing of structural relationships, e.g., the processing of simple morphology and syntax. At its core, linguistic relativity concerns itself with the conceptual categories of language, that is to say, with the influence of habitual semantic processing. In contrast to simple grammatical parsing, semantic processing seems to involve neurology scattered over many regions of the cortex. This renders a strictly modular account of semantic processing less plausible. 1 Accordingly, it appears impossible to rule out interesting interactions between language processing and other conceptual processing on the basis of what is currently known about the human brain.

Arguments against linguistic relativity generally only argue for a deficiency in a “pro” linguistic relativity argument. Any such successful defeat of a single linguistic relativity study entails only that there is no evidence in this specific instance of a linguistic relativity “effect”. One cannot generalize from a null result in one study to the conclusion that there can be no interesting effects in other linguistic and cognitive domains.

In other words, the irony of the “con” position is that linguistic relativity cannot be definitively disproven. One can always argue that the lack of results demonstrating a linguistic relativity hypothesis for a particular study should be taken as indicative that linguistic relativity effects would not be found elsewhere. However, such an argument remains largely an article of faith. Conversely, should a “pro” linguistic relativity study convince skeptics that an effect exists in a particular context and domain, it would be a similar article of faith to assume it exists elsewhere. Because of this, linguistic relativity researchers generally seek to find language effects in domains where skeptics would assume they would not be possible. To show an effect in a domain which is generally considered to be cross-culturally quite variable is less likely to impress than in an area in which cognitive universals have been presumed. Levinson and colleagues worked with spatial language and cognition for precisely this reason (see especially the discussion in Levinson (1996 a , 2003 b ) as spatial language and cognition had been assumed to be largely invariant across languages and cultures. Research demonstrating variation in such a domain would naturally lead to serious consideration of a potentially large interplay between language and cognition. See the discussion in section 29.7 below.

There has been a recent and overdue trend toward formulating more precise hypotheses about specific conceptual categories in contextualized usage and what possible effects one’s native language may have on the use and availability of these categories. Working with color terminology, Kay and Regier (2007) argue that a more complex model of the interactions between the cognitively universal and the linguistically specific must be developed. Similarly, Imai and Mazuka (2003) seek a more complex model for balancing the cognitively universal and language specificity in their work with the individuation of objects (as opposed to mass/substance). Arguably, the lack of such subtle models has been an obstacle to linguistic relativity research in the past. In other words, individual linguistic relativity studies should never expect to resolve such a uselessly broad question as “does language affect cognition”.

A partial list of the genuinely unresolved issues around linguistic relativity are:

What, if any, conceptual or processing domains are susceptible to the influence of linguistic categorization? Presumably, the more fundamental these domains are to cognition and the more their processes are shared with non-linguistic species, the less likely there might be an effect from linguistic categorization. However, is there a discernable boundary between those domains affected by language and those which are not?

What variation exists across languages, i.e., to what extent are languages locked into one way of expression vs. having alternative modes of expression? If there is little variation of a particular category in human language, then it is essentially impossible to decide whether that variation is due to innate cognitive constraints or some other universal guiding principle. It may be that certain language categories are an inevitable feature of a communication system with the complexity and constraints of human language without any need for a genetically predetermined mechanism. Conversely, the features of the studied languages which are said to vary across these languages are often poorly described. For instance, a language may be described as lacking a particular category, when it does in fact express that category but in a way which the researcher did not attend to. The controversy about whether Mandarin expresses conditional reasoning is one such example (cf. the brief discussion of the Bloom controversy below).

Further, what is the nature of linguistic expression needed for there to be a notable effect on non-linguistic cognition? Traditionally, linguistic relativity studies have focused on grammatically obligatory marking of conceptual categories. When a category is grammatically obligatory, it is taken to be more fundamental than when its expression is optional and less common. On the other hand, when a speaker does express such a category through a more circumlocutory means this certainly implies availability of the category. Pederson et al. (1998) addressed a purported language effect on cognition by constraining both the language and the cognitive task to a specific context. The relationship between language encoding in that context was taken to relate to cognitive processes involved in roughly the same context. What relationship other language uses might have to other cognitive tasks was unexplored.

Similarly, under what conditions do language categories affect non-linguistic cognition (whatever that may be) and when do they not affect cognition? Linguistic relativity studies need not assume that any effect of language categorization on cognition will be uniform and constant. Most narrowly, a study can only argue that an effect is found in the experimental setting used. It is unclear how far one can extrapolate from one experimental setting to a broader class of human behavior. Understandably, opponents of linguistic relativity studies will tend to dismiss any discovered effects as being task-specific while proponents will extrapolate as far as possible.

What is the mechanism of any interaction between language categories and the rest of cognition? For all the advances of cognitive psychology in the past decades, we still lack a detailed model of human cognitive processes. This makes it particularly challenging to formulate specific hypotheses about how one language’s categorization might influence other processes. Nonetheless, linguistic relativity studies can still look for behavioral evidence for some effect on non-linguistic processing—even if the exact nature of that process can only be speculative.

29.5 What Might a Language Effect Be

Should research demonstrate a correlation between a variable pattern of language and a corresponding variation in other cognitively driven behavior, there remain a couple of issues with the interpretation of results.

How do we infer from any correlation between a language pattern and a cognitively driven behavior that there is a particular direction of causation? Perhaps the cognitive systems vary across two different cultures for some reason other than language. This most likely would be because of a cultural difference driving the difference in both language use and cognitive patterns across the two cultures. Such an argument was presented in Li and Gleitman (2002) with a rebuttal in Levinson et al. (2002) . That language variation is simply a reflection of non-linguistic cultural variation seems initially a reasonable possibility. Certainly this is the case for recent adoption of lexical items expressing relatively new concepts, i.e., the cultural concern predates the linguistic pattern. On the other hand, if the linguistic pattern in question is represented by a long-fossilized grammatical construction, then it seems far more likely that the linguistic pattern predates any non-linguistic cultural pattern. Of course, since language is one of the major vehicles for transmitting culture across generations, it is not straightforward to distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic cultural patterns. For further discussion of linguistic relativity vis-à-vis culture, see Hanks (1990) , Bickel (2000) , and Enfield (2000) .

Another concern is that the experimental task seeking to measure a non-linguistic cognitive pattern might not in fact be a non-linguistic task because it is actually mediated by internal processing of language. Should this be the case, a relationship between language and non-linguistic cognition would not be demonstrated. While it is possible to block linguistic behavior during a task by having participants repeat nonsense syllables or engage in other language-masking behavior, this is usually considered too intrusive in a task of appreciable difficulty. The more consciously accessible the desired solution is to the participant, the more likely it is that the participant might choose to adopt a (conscious) strategy of relying on language to solve the task. On the other hand, Pederson (1995) argues that, if a participant selects to use language as the means for solving a task, the participant must understand the categories of that language to be appropriate and reflective of the cognitive categories appropriate to the task. If there were a disconnection between the categories of language and the cognitive categories which would otherwise be used, it is unclear what would sanction the reliance on language.

This last point relates to the often cited “thinking for speaking” notion presented in Slobin (1991) and taken up by many. This idea allows for a language effect on conceptualization for those representations which must be talked about. After all, if the grammar of a language requires encoding a certain type of information, that information should be encoded in the underlying representation when it is to be communicated. One possibility is that all information that any language might require to be encoded would be part of the representation of every speaker of every language. Only the elements required by a particular language would necessarily be brought into focus by speakers of that language, but the universal set of concepts is encoded prior to any linguistic coding. Since the superset of distinctions which any language might require is far greater than what any one language requires, it is clearly more efficient that speakers encode the information which they know will be needed for expression in their particular language and bother less with other information in the absence of other reasons to encode that information. In other words, for the purpose of speaking, speakers will encode events in memory differently depending on the communicative requirements of their languages.

This thinking-for-speaking model appeals as a compromise between heavy-handed linguistic determinism and complete universalism. Unfortunately, it is unclear exactly how such a model might work. If a speaker witnesses an event, will she encode to memory the information needed for retelling only when the event is suspected to be one she will want to communicate about later? This seems unlikely and unworkable. Any event might need to be described later, so conservatively the speaker should always encode the information to be communicated (or habitually invent it on retelling). This then becomes tantamount to speakers encoding information using language as their guide, which is essentially the premise of linguistic relativity and not a compromise position at all. In short, it is unclear how a model of cognition could be built with separate processes of thinking for speaking and thinking for not speaking.

29.6 Language Development

Related to linguistic relativity studies with adults is a growing body of research investigating cross-linguistic variation in child development. After all, if linguistic categorization helps to direct cognitive categorization, there must ultimately be a developmental account to explain this. One’s first language is notably learned during a period of remarkable conceptual development. In keeping with the universalist bias in psycholinguistics and with a shortage of first language development studies across a diverse set of languages, it was all to easy to assume that children learned language by mapping universal conceptual categories onto a fairly constant set of word meanings. There would certainly be little variation expected in the semantics of child language even if the adult languages seem to exhibit different patterns. The work of Bowerman, Brown, Choi, and others, e.g., Choi and Bowerman (1991) , Bowerman and Choi (2001) , Brown (2001) , and the collection Bowerman and Brown (2008) , have challenged these assumptions by arguing that the lexical meaning of children’s words are strongly influenced by the idiosyncrasies of the target language. Children’s lexical categories can vary dramatically cross-linguistically—suggesting that the process of language-specific category formation can begin early in development. Further, the target languages can differ substantially from one another in precisely the ways that make linguistic relativity questions interesting.

As Whorf is to linguistic relativity, so is Vygotsky (1986) to studies of linguistically mediated child development. In his model, the acquisition of the categories of language is assumed to be a primary vehicle for the development of a (deeper) understanding of these concepts. For example, de Villiers and de Villiers (2000 , 2003 ) credit the acquisition of complementation strategies of natural language as allowing the development of representations of the beliefs of others. Lucy and Gaskins (2001 , 2003 ) have investigated a correlation between Yucatecan and American behavior in a sorting task and the corresponding organization of lexical categories in Yucatec Mayan and English. Interestingly, and broadly consistent with Vygotsky, the acquisition of the language-specific lexical categories appears to precede by a few years the development of the corresponding sorting behavior. This sorting behavior is taken to reflect underlying preferences for conceptual categorization.

29.7 Domains of Research

As mentioned, linguistic relativity studies generally explore domains of language and cognition for which one might expect strong universal tendencies. Any such findings will naturally be most vigorously scrutinized and, should they survive such scrutiny, they will be all the more theoretically influential. Accordingly, most linguistic relativity research can be found in just a few cognitively fundamental domains. Even on the most charitable readings for the various linguistic relativity studies to date, some domains have clearly been more fruitful for purported language effects than others, though it is not always clear why this may be so.

Color has long been one of the battlegrounds for the linguistic relativity debate. On the one hand, languages clearly vary in their color terminology, suggesting that there may well be substantive differences in speakers’ organization of color categorizations. On the other hand, the reference of color terms nonetheless appear subject to some universal/perceptual constraints since, barring color blindness, people have essentially identical color perception prior to any higher-level cognitive processing of that information.

One of the first empirical linguistic relativity studies to be published compared English and Zuni color categorization ( Lenneberg and Roberts 1956 ). Kay and Kempton (1984) is also one of the more classic citations. As an apparent language effect occurred under one condition presentation of color stimuli, but not under a slightly different presentation, Kay and Kempton is frequently cited as support both for and against linguistic relativity effects. Some more recent work on color terms and linguistic relativity includes the substantial collection in Hardin and Maffi (1997) . Explicitly expanding the work of Kay and Kempton is the extensive work by Davies and colleagues ( Corbett and Davies 1997 ; Davies and Corbett 1997 ; Davies 1998 ; Davies et al. 1998 ; Oezgen and Davies 1998 ) which explores for demonstrable effects of color naming on color categorization tasks.

Space has also been assumed to be a domain with a strong universalist underpinning in cognition and in language. Since all humans interact with the same basic environmental properties, there seemed little reason to actually conduct cross-cultural and cross-linguistic investigations in this domain. Seizing on previously little reported, but globally widespread, variation in the linguistic expression of space, Levinson and colleagues have argued that fundamental differences in spatial reasoning and memory encoding co-vary with linguistic expression. Two well-known works in this area are Levinson (1996 a ) and Pederson et al. (1998) , which examine languages which habitually use different expressions of reference frames, that is, of the coordinate systems by which one locates objects relative to one another in space. They present spatial memory tasks demonstrating an underlying difference in the categories used to reconstruct spatial arrays from memory.

Unsurprisingly, these arguments have met with criticism from those believing that the human cognition of space must be fairly autonomous from general patterns of language. This skepticism tends to be strongest from those who have not worked with languages differing from the modern European norms. Li and Gleitman (2002) argued that spatial cognition is flexible and largely contextually driven rather than linguistically motivated. They modified the Levinson experiments by manipulating the physical environment of the experiment in a way that they claim demonstrates that the underlying frame of reference is determined by experimental context rather than habitual language encoding. However, the modifications Li and Gleitman made to the experiments are rejected as misleading in Levinson et al. (2002) . When the experiments were reconducted to the original specifications with Dutch participants (in Levinson et al. 2002 ) and with American-English speakers ( Church 2005 ), participants continued to behave in a way better predicted by linguistic pattern than the immediate testing environment. This debate is also continued in Majid (2002) and Majid et al. (2004) . Clearly linguistic relativity studies—both arguments for and against a language effect—need to carefully attend to the details of design. For an extensive summary of this work with spatial reference frames consult Levinson (2003 b ) .

In contrast to investigations into space, there has been little exploration in potential variation in temporal organization. This seems primarily due to three reasons. First, time is essentially one-dimensional, which is clearly simpler than multi-dimensional space, so the logical possibilities of variation are necessarily reduced. Second, at least linguistically, time is generally considered to be expressed in ways derivative of spatial expression (though see Tenbrink 2007 for a critique of this). If the categories of time are essentially derivative of space, then why not study space as the more fundamental domain? Third, and non-trivially, time is generally considered as abstract and metaphorical. While this suggests that variation of expression might be widespread, it also suggests that experiments may be quite challenging to design.

Capitalizing on the metaphorical nature of temporal expression in Mandarin and English, Boroditsky (2000 , 2001 ) argues that different patterns of linguistic expression drive different conceptualizations of time across the two languages. Note, however, that Chen (2007) and January and Kako (2007) fail to replicate her findings and suggest that the linguistic hypothesis itself may not have been adequate. This reinforces the point made above about the importance of careful linguistic description prior to hypothesis.

Combining space and time, we have motion events. Encoding motion events is one of the more fundamental tasks of natural language. Motion events are presumably perceptually universal, yet they are complex enough to suggest a range of conceptualizations should be possible. Talmy (1985) presented a typology of motion events in natural language suggesting that languages type according to one of two basic types in their expression of the path component of a motion event. Slobin and colleagues have used language production data from a variety of languages to argue that the type of language one uses has substantial consequences for how motion events will be represented; see Slobin (2000 , 2003 ) and Slobin et al. (2014) . A number of studies have tried to find cognitive correlations in wholly non-linguistic tasks with speakers of different language types with mixed results ( Naigles and Terrazas 1998 ; Papafragou et al. 2001 ; Finkbeiner et al. 2002 ; Oh 2003 ; Bohnemeyer et al. 2007 ). Loucks and Pederson (2014) argue that this is not so much because there is no language effect to be found in the conception of motion events but that the Talmy typology is insufficient for the purposes of generating a testable hypothesis. Since the processing of motion events is of such fundamental importance and languages do vary in their default representations of such events, we can expect linguistic relativity research to continue in this domain.

Various studies of European languages have observed that speakers (perhaps unsurprisingly) evaluate the references of nouns as having more masculine or feminine qualities based on their (cross-linguistically variable) grammatical gender assignment. For a brief summary of this research, see Boroditsky et al. (2003) . This research has not yet expanded to include the influences of nominal categorization across the broader and more varied range found in linguistic typology (see, for example, the collection in Craig 1986 ). It does seem that this could serve as an interesting domain for future linguistic relativity research.

Noun phrases also vary cross-linguistically as to their expression of plurality. Some languages mark dual as well as plural. Other languages only rarely explicitly mark plural and rely on context to imply a difference in number specification. As cited in the introduction, Lucy (1992 a ) examined grammatical number differences across Yucate-can Mayan and American English speakers and argued that this language difference played out in a difference in the memory encoding of numbers of objects in visual drawing.

Domains which are susceptible to the influence of formal training have been particularly controversial for linguistic relativity studies. Usually people’s abilities to use logic and number are viewed as stronger or weaker rather than as different but equal. This generally requires a hypothesis that one community is advantaged and another disadvantaged by their default linguistic code. Two areas in particular have received particular attention: counterfactual reasoning and arithmetic number.

Bloom (1981) proposed that Mandarin lacks an explicit counterfactual construction and that this leads to a greater challenge in counterfactual reasoning for Mandarin speakers than, for instance, for English speakers who do not lack such a construction. Subsequent studies have argued that while Mandarin may lack a dedicated counterfactual construction, it does have regular means of creating sentences which are clearly counterfactual in context. See the debate spread across Au (1983 , 1984 ), Bloom (1984) , Liu (1985) , and more recently Cara and Politzer (1993) . Further, Lardiere (1992) found that her sample of Arabic speakers patterned more like Bloom’s Mandarin speakers than like English speakers despite Arabic having a counterfactual construction. From this, she reasonably concludes that other cultural factors than language are at play.

Miura and colleagues ( Miura 1987 ; Miura et al. 1988 ; Miura and Okamoto 1989 ; Miura et al. 1993 ; Miura et al. 1994 ; Miura et al. 1999 ) have argued that speakers of Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages which have a consistent base-ten lexical set are advantaged in learning arithmetic over speakers of languages which have words like “eleven” and similar irregular numbers. It is particularly challenging to factor out family educational values and other cultural factors from such studies. Saxton and Towse (1998) also found that seemingly subtle changes in presentation could make the purported language effect disappear. They interpret this to suggest that any language effect about base-ten numbers is quite indirect.

Watson (1987) argued that the differing grammatical treatment of number in Yoruba disadvantaged monolingual Yoruba children in learning early arithmetic compared to their peers who are bilingual with English. Greiffenhagen and Sharrock (2007) provide a largely philosophical rebuttal against this work as part of a larger argument that linguistic relativity is scarcely an empirical enterprise.

Impressionistically, there is considerable variation in emotional responses and personality types across cultures. To date, the linguistic descriptions of emotion and personality terms have far too heavy a reliance on translation to allow for testable linguistic relativity hypotheses to be developed. It is nonetheless an area ripe for exploration as it is at least intuitively possible that the categories of emotion and personality expressed in language provide a template along which individuals may mold themselves. See, for example, Marmaridou (2006) for a linguistic description of Greek pain lexicalization.

Working within a single language, Lindquist et al. (2006) find priming and suppression effects in categorization of facial expression from the presentation of words denoting emotions. These findings at least raise the possibility that regular use of language-specific emotion terms may well influence speaker’s processing of emotions.

29.8 Summary

All of the research in linguistic relativity to date makes up only the smallest fraction of work within linguistics and the other cognitive sciences. In fact, given the general public interest in the topic, one could say that there has been an appallingly small amount of research. For many, linguistic relativity studies are readily dismissed as counter to current theoretical assumptions. That said, the relationship between the most uniquely human characteristics—linguistic communication and our astounding cognitive capacities—is clearly of profound interest. The last decade has shown a dramatic surge of academic interest in linguistic relativity, and the hypotheses generated and the methods employed to test these hypotheses have shown steady development. After approximately fifty years, the field of linguistic relativity studies may still be young but it shows every sign of developing into an exciting and robust field of research.

There are countless, largely technical accounts of what is known of the neurology of language processes. The conclusions and the technologies are continually being updated, so the best first source for readers interested in this topic would be a current textbook in psycholinguistics.

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• Front Psychol

Language may indeed influence thought

Jordan zlatev.

1 Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Johan Blomberg

2 Centre for Languages and Literature/Department of Philosophy, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

3 Institut für Sprache und Kommunikation, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

We discuss four interconnected issues that we believe have hindered investigations into how language may affect thinking. These have had a tendency to reappear in the debate concerning linguistic relativity over the past decades, despite numerous empirical findings. The first is the claim that it is impossible to disentangle language from thought, making the question concerning “influence” pointless. The second is the argument that it is impossible to disentangle language from culture in general, and from social interaction in particular, so it is impossible to attribute any differences in the thought patterns of the members of different cultures to language per se . The third issue is the objection that methodological and empirical problems defeat all but the most trivial version of the thesis of linguistic influence: that language gives new factual information. The fourth is the assumption that since language can potentially influence thought from “not at all” to “completely,” the possible forms of linguistic influence can be placed on a cline, and competing theories can be seen as debating the actual position on this cline. We analyze these claims and show that the first three do not constitute in-principle objections against the validity of the project of investigating linguistic influence on thought, and that the last one is not the best way to frame the empirical challenges at hand. While we do not argue for any specific theory or mechanism for linguistic influence on thought, our discussion and the reviewed literature show that such influence is clearly possible, and hence in need of further investigations.

Introduction

The two related questions if and how language affects the mind go back to the dawn of contemplative thought. Since thought and language are intimately connected, some form of close relationship between the two has often been assumed. The recurrent debate, with oscillating tendencies, has been whether it is mostly thought that influences language, or vice versa ( Zlatev, 2008a ). The thesis that language has a non-negligible effect on thinking, combined with the claim that languages are non-trivially different, has been generally known as “the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.” This is a rather misleading label, introduced by Carroll (1956) in the preface to the well-known collection of papers by Benjamin Lee Whorf Language, thought and reality . In fact, the original idea did not amount to an empirical hypothesis, but to what we would today call a “research program,” and its main promotor was Whorf. With 60-years long hindsight, we can now observe that after a prolonged period of scientific mistrust, what Whorf (1956 , p. 213) dubbed the principle of linguistic relativity appears to find a substantial degree of support in interdisciplinary research from the past two decades ( Lucy, 1992 , 1997 ; Pederson, 1995 ; Gumperz and Levinson, 1996 ; Slobin, 1996 ; Boroditsky, 2001 ; Gentner and Goldin-Meadow, 2003 ; Levinson, 2003 ; Casasanto et al., 2004 ; Majid et al., 2004 ; Casasanto, 2008 ; Casasanto and Boroditsky, 2008 ; Boroditsky and Gaby, 2010 ; Wolff and Holmes, 2011 ; Lupyan, 2012 ).

At the same time, the thesis that language influences thought, in one or more possible ways, especially when combined with the thesis of linguistic relativity, continues to be highly controversial, and every now and then provokes sweeping criticisms, describing the enterprise as fatally flawed ( Pinker, 1994 ; McWhorter, 2014 ). On the other hand, some proponents of the thesis have also been relatively one-sided ( Durst-Andersen, 2011 ). Perhaps it is as stated by Ellis (1993 , p. 55): “[T]he Whorf hypothesis seems to bring out the worst in those who discuss it.”

In this article, we wish to take a few steps back, and consider the following objections that have been leveled at the project. First, some have proposed that the question of language influencing thought is conceptually unsound: since the two cannot even be distinguished, thought cannot exist independently of language. A second objection is that it is impossible to disentangle language from culture in general, and from social interaction in particular, so it is impossible to attribute differences in the thought patterns of the members of different cultural communities to the structures of language. A third critique states that the strong thesis of linguistic influence is methodologically circular, or else false, while the weak thesis is trivial. A fourth issue is not so much an objection as something that has been presented in the way of a practical solution to the dilemma: since language can potentially influence thought from “not at all” to “completely,” theoretical proposals can be arranged on a cline from “weak” to “strong,” and the only issue is to determine the place of linguistic influence on the cline, presumably toward the weak end.

We examine each one of these issues in turn. To anticipate, concerning the first three objections, we propose that the force of the critique has been overstated and the conceptual problems can be avoided. With respect to the final point, we argue that at least some “language influence” theories differ not quantitatively but qualitatively, according to two independent dimensions. Our aim is thus to show that much of the dismissive critique against language-thought influence and linguistic relativity is unsatisfactory, and thereby to pave the way for further research. While we often refer to relevant empirical findings, our aim is not primarily empirical – to answer how exactly language influences thought – but to clarify the semiotic space surrounding the debate. The outcome of this clarification is (minimally) the conclusion that it is fully possible for language to influence thought, and that it remains to determine the ways in which this possibility is actualized in practice ( Wolff and Holmes, 2011 ). Such cross-fertilization of conceptual and empirical concerns is characteristic of the new field of cognitive semiotics ( Zlatev, 2012 ) which the present approach instantiates.

Disentangling Language from Thought

A classical objection against the possibility of cogently posing the question of linguistic influence on thought is to reject the proposition that the latter could even exist in the absence of language. Philosophers, at least since Humboldt (who wrote: “…the idea is born, becomes an object and returns, perceived anew as such, into the subjective mind. For this, language is inevitable,” quoted and translated by Zinken, 2008 , fn. 10), have often been inclined to such a radical position, implying that without language we would be thought-less, or even mindless. While this view still has its champions among philosophers ( Dennett, 1991 ; Macphail, 1998 ), it is harder to find it represented in psychology or the language sciences. Still, some researchers following Humberto Maturana (e.g., Maturana, 1988 ), who placed an especially heavy emphasis on the role of language (or languaging) for the “construction of reality,” appear to accept a version of this view:

An existing impasse in the study of this relationship (i.e., between language and mind) cannot be overcome as long as the problem itself is not reformulated to rid it of the intrinsically dualistic assumption that there is, in fact, a phenomenon called ‘language’ that is ontologically independent of the phenomenon called ‘mind.’ […] mind cannot be understood without and outside of language.

( Kravchenko, 2011 , p. 355)

It is quite possible to agree with such claims in some respects, e.g., that treating language and thought as fundamentally different “modules” or “representations” is mistaken ( Lupyan, 2012 ), but nevertheless maintain that language and thought should not be equated, since doing so would short-circuit the crucial question concerning their interrelation ( Vygotsky, 1962 ).

A convenient definition of language, adopted in some of our earlier work is that of a predominantly conventional semiotic system for communication and thought ( Zlatev, 2007 , 2008b ). This comprises the point that languages are essentially “socially shared symbolic systems” ( Nelson and Shaw, 2002 ), which have evolved over millennia and develop in children over years, to serve two main functions: sharing experiences and enhancing cognition. Indeed, this definition implies that thought is not impossible without language and that it is possible to treat the two phenomena as distinct, e.g., “Language invades our thinking because languages are good to think with” ( Bowerman and Levinson, 2001 , p. 584). By “thought,” we mean essentially mediated cognition . This corresponds approximately to what are sometimes called “higher cognitive processes,” in which the mind is not fully immersed in the practical concerns of the here-and-now, but rather employs various structures and processes of conscious awareness such as mental imagery, episodic memories or explicit anticipations to focus on intentional objects that are not perceptually present. We believe that this corresponds fairly well to the folk-psychological concept of “thought” and “thinking.” It is worthwhile distinguishing this, at least analytically, from non-mediated forms of cognition, including (conscious and non-conscious) processes of perception, movement, procedural memory and implicit anticipation. We propose that the issue of “linguistic influence on thought” can be circumscribed in this way. This does not exclude the possibility that language may in some cases even “modulate” perception ( Lupyan, 2012 ), as the attested presence of such modulation – in nearly all cases found to be transitory and context-dependent – can also be interpreted as an instance of linguistic mediation.

Given these explications of the key concepts, what is the evidence that it is language alone that can give rise to thought, or in other words: serve as the “sole mediator” of cognition? Phenomenological analysis (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945 ; Husserl, 1989/1952 ) and psychological research all show that mediated cognition is possible without language. For example, monkeys are capable of making decisions on the basis of judgments of whether a given stimulus is familiar or not, which is difficult to explain without episodic memory ( Griffin and Speck, 2004 ). Chimpanzees and orangutans are apparently capable of planning for the (near) future ( Osvath and Osvath, 2008 ), and at least chimpanzees and bonobos display behaviors such as consolation and tactical deception which require one to place oneself “in the shoes” of someone else, known as cognitive empathy ( Preston and de Waal, 2002 ). Of course, there are forms of thinking that are indisputably linguistically mediated: internal speech, complex planning, and an autobiographic self-concept ( Nelson, 1996 ). Few would doubt that language plays a constitutive role in such “linguistic thought,” though many questions remain concerning the extent to which this is so, and by which “mechanisms” this is realized ( Bowerman and Levinson, 2001 ; Casasanto, 2008 ; Wolff and Holmes, 2011 ). The point is that not all instances of thought, and even less so of cognition in general, are co-extensive with language. Thus, the question of linguistic influence on thought can be formulated fairly simply: to what extent and in which ways does language mediate cognition?

A counter-claim could be that even if thought and language can be in principle (ontologically) distinguished, this is not possible methodologically – for “languaging” creatures such as us. This issue presents itself clearly in empirical research on linguistic relativity: as with Einstein’s principle of relativity, some form of stable “reality” is presupposed to be able to establish the differences between “measurements” or perspectives in the first place. This reality need not, as the invariance of light in Einstein’s theory, be understood as something that is strictly mind-independent, but rather as the world of perception ( Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945 ). Many readers of the supposed relativist Whorf are surprised to find multiple references to such a universal level of experience.

To compare ways in which different languages differently ‘segment’ the same situation of experience, it is desirable to analyze or ‘segment’ the experience first in a way independent of any language or linguistic stock, a way which will be the same for all observers

( Whorf, 1956 , p. 162).

In describing differences between [languages] … we must have a way of describing phenomena by non-linguistic standards and by terms that refer to experience as it must be to all human beings, irrespective of their languages or philosophies

(Whorf and Trager, 1938, p. 6).

Even if other passages of Whorf’s writings can be read as proposing that thought is fully dependent on language ( Brown, 1976 ), quotations such as these clearly show that Whorf accepted a pre-linguistic mode of representation that was yet unaffected by language, and hence the need to compare languages with respect to the degrees to which they departed from such experience. Indeed, as the quotations above imply, Whorf even regarded this as a methodological necessity. This position is accepted in all current empirical research in linguistic relativity, such as the active field of motion event typology ( Talmy, 2000 ), where it is investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in motion expressions correlate with non-linguistic categorizations (e.g., Slobin, 2003 ). Such studies presuppose prior analyses of the domain itself, i.e., analyses that necessitate the possibility to classify experience “independent of any language or linguistic stock.” In previous work, we have proposed exactly such an analysis of motion on the basis of three binary parameters (TRANSLOCATIVE, BOUNDED, CAUSED), distinguishing between eight kinds of motion situations ( Zlatev et al., 2010 ). This provided a better conceptual basis for describing semantic differences between languages in the expression of motion ( Blomberg, 2014 ) than the original Talmian framework. Such an analysis is a necessary precondition for asking Whorfian questions.

To summarize, defining language and thought in a way that is both true to the phenomena, and allowing them to be both distinguished and co-related, is a first prerequisite for further investigations into their relationship. Occasional claims that such distinction is ontologically or methodologically impossible seem to derive from strong theoretical biases rather than from conceptual necessity or empirical evidence.

Disassociating Language and Cultural Context

Somewhat similarly to the critique from the previous section Björk (2008) argues that current studies in linguistic relativity, often referred to as “neo-Whorfian” (cf. McWhorter, 2014 ) adopt a simplified and static view of language:

The neo-Whorfian studies investigate the role of linguistic diversity in the language-and-thought relation, and language is thus explored primarily as ‘particular languages,’ such as English, Tzeltal, Dutch, or Yucatec Maya. The particular languages are viewed as demarcated, cognitively represented systems, in which linguistic meaning is inherent. That is, linguistic meaning is given by the system, prior to any particular situation of language use. The term ‘language,’ that sometimes comes into the discussion about relativity as opposed to ‘languages,’ seems to refer to general aspects of having ‘a language,’ a code. When communication is mentioned, this too seems to be a general aspect of using ‘a language.’

( Björk, 2008 , pp. 125–126)

Of course, there is more to language than using a particular ‘code’: actual, situated language use, which is also tightly intertwined with socio-cultural practices. For example, a study of linguistic effects on spatial cognition would be simplistic if it only considered “spatial expressions” like prepositions. These should rather be seen as elements in social practices, or “language games” ( Wittgenstein, 1953 ), inseparable from the activities in which they participate in, like asking for directions and specifying the location of objects, events, places, and people. In other words, language needs to be understood as socio-culturally situated : “Linguistic meaning is inextricable from the social practices (language games), in which language is used. The mastery of a language is embedded in, and in important ways formative of, one’s cultural background” ( Zlatev, 1997 , p. 5). Consequently, it is only actual linguistic practices that can have an effect on thought. To claim that linguistic structures – as a distinct and separate “variable” – can function as causes of cognitive differences in the speakers of different languages is to evoke abstract, and ontologically suspicious, entities as causes ( Berthele, 2013 ).

As before, we can in part agree with such a critique, but believe that it both exaggerates the problem, and underestimates the methodological sophistication of neo-Whorfian research, where factors such as usage frequency are taken into account ( Slobin, 1996 ; Casasanto, 2008 ). Conceptually, the notion of language should indeed include, and possibly even privilege situationally and culturally embedded discourse. But this does not mean that the ontology of language should be restricted to such discourse, and thereby exclude “particular languages,” such as English, Tzeltal, Dutch, or the general notion of having a language, associated with particular universal properties (such as displaced reference and predication ). These three aspects: situated discourse, particular language and language in general actually appear as distinct levels of language in the meta-linguistic framework of Coseriu (1985) , as shown in his matrix of levels and perspectives, displayed in Table ​ Table1 1 . This explicitly pluralistic and non-reductionist linguistic ontology (cf. Zlatev, 2011 ) not only acknowledges the existence of universal, historical, and situated levels of language (vertically), but also of different perspectives on each of these (horizontally): language as creative activity, as competence and as product. All these are to some degree independent, but complementary and interacting aspects of language. In line with Björk (2008) , we can agree that the most “real” or actual aspect of language is that of discourse, since it is both most “alive,” unfolding in the communication between speakers and hearers, and most contextualized. At the same time, discourse will be constrained by the grammatical and semantic norms of the particular language, as well as of potentially universal aspects of pragmatics, such as the cooperative principle ( Grice, 1975 ). While the linguistic norms of a language community do not determine actual speech, and hence the thought processes related to it, the “historical” level clearly influences that of discourse, in a way that is analogous to the ways social norms influence social behavior ( Itkonen, 2008 ).

Coseriu’s matrix; adapted from Coseriu (1985 ; see also Zlatev, 2011 ), highlighting Discourse as the privileged, but non-exclusive aspect of language.

The discussion so far concerned the relations between language-as-system and language-as-discourse, showing that while the two are closely related, the system level is neither an epiphenomenon, nor a figment of the imagination of (structural) linguists, and hence has the potential to be “causally efficacious.” However, one may grant this, but still deny that the system of lexical and grammatical norms can be dissociated from other aspects of culture, such as shared beliefs and attitudes. Thus, to the extent that there are differences in thought, these should be attributed to cultures rather than languages (cf. McWhorter, 2014 ). In fact, Whorf and his predecessors Boas and Sapir, always considered the possibility of cultural beliefs and practices interacting with “grammatical patterns as interpretations of experience” ( Whorf, 1956 , p. 137) in a reciprocal manner. It has, however, been more difficult to provide evidence for a direct causal link from such beliefs to any aspect of “habitual thought” that could be empirically attested. Everett’s (2005) proposal that the high value that the Pirahã attach to “direct experience” is the main reason for their language lacking numerals and many aspects of grammatical complexity such as hierarchical structure, is a case to the point: while not lacking plausibility, the claim has remained strongly controversial and difficult to validate. A stronger case can be made that it is the “habitual patterns” of language – possibly reflecting some particular aspect of the respective culture – that exercise such effects. As Levinson (2005 , p. 638) writes:

Everett […] prefers an account in terms of the causal efficacy of culture, but no one interested in language diversity would make a simple dichotomy between language and culture: a language of course is a crucial part of a culture and is adapted to the rest of it. […] The question neo-Whorfians are interested in is how culture gets into the head, so to speak, and here language appears to play a crucial role: it is learnt far earlier than most aspects of the culture, is the most highly practiced set of cultural skills, and is a representational system that is at once public and private, cultural, and mental.

Methodologically, studies have been designed so as to attempt to tease apart the respective roles of language and other aspects of culture, for example by including speakers from languages where certain particular linguistic structures are similar, while there are many other cultural differences, e.g., Yucatec Maya and Japanese ( Lucy, 1992 ). Indeed, in this study the participants of the two groups behaved similarly with respect to object categorization, and differently from, e.g., speakers of English, and this could be plausibly attributed to the extensive use of nominal classifiers in both Yucatec Maya and Japanese.

Conversely, one may test speakers from populations that are very similar culturally, and even linguistically – apart from one particularly relevant variable. This was the case in Pederson’s (1995) study comparing speakers of Tamil who preferentially used a “relative” reference frame for locating objects in space, with terms corresponding English left-right-front-back , with another group of Tamil speakers who were familiar with this usage, but preferred to use an “absolute” reference frame, with terms corresponding to north-south-east-west . In other words, what one group would tend to phrase as ‘the glass is to the left of the plate,’ would be preferentially expressed in terms of cardinal directions, e.g., ‘the glass is to the west of the plate,’ by the other. In experiments of the type that have since then been used for a number of languages ( Levinson, 2003 ), it was shown that the two groups tended to solve non-linguistic spatial tasks in ways that corresponded to their linguistic preferences. These results are important since as Pederson (1995 , p. 40) writes, “this difference in habitual language use is not deeply rooted in the grammatical system,” i.e., it was not a matter of obligatory or “abstract” properties of two substantially different languages, but was rather a matter of preferences of two very closely related dialects. Still these were sufficient to give rise to differences in solving (apparently) non-linguistic tasks.

Finally, the fact that there is a debate concerning the respective causal roles of language structures and non-linguistic cultural patterns is indicative enough that the distinction is not only conceptually possible, but also empirically useful. Ultimately, empirical evidence should be able to resolve some particular debates on this matter. For example, Ji et al. (2005) reported differences in styles of visual attention (“analytic” vs. “holistic”) between East-Asian and American participants, and attributed these to non-linguistic cultural differences: individualist vs. collectivist values, respectively. Durst-Andersen (2011) disagrees, and rather places languages as diverse as Chinese, Russian, and Spanish in the (super)type of “reality-oriented” languages, on the basis of common structural features such as grammatical aspect. This implies that Russian and Spanish speakers should behave like the Chinese, rather than the North Americans in visual attention tasks. To the extent that this prediction holds, the Whorfian interpretation would be supported; if not, the proposal for some degree of “cultural relativity” would retain its credibility. Finally, one may note that what makes Nisbett’s thesis of cultural relativity more testable than Everett’s, mentioned earlier, is precisely that it does not concern a single culture but many different ones, according to a hypothetical typology. It is this that allows formulating contrastive predictions.

“Interesting” and “Trivial” Kinds of Language Influence?

In an influential review article, Bloom and Keil (2001) made the distinction between two kinds of claims/theories of linguistic influence on thought, referring to the first as “interesting” and the second as “trivial”:

[W]e do want to insist on the distinction between the interesting claim that language induces theory change because of linguistic structure (e.g., the particular words it has) vs. the trivial claim that language induces theory change because of the information it conveys. There is a big difference, after all, between arguing that children’s developing theory of, say, the social world is shaped by the specific lexical division that their languages make (interesting) vs. arguing that children’s developing theory of the social world is shaped by what they hear people talking about (trivial).

( Bloom and Keil, 2001 , p. 362, original emphasis)

This passage merits some explanation. The authors here assume a “theoretical” perspective on cognitive development, according to which we build up (implicit) theories about the world, including “theories” about other human beings and ourselves ( Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997 ). Hence, any act of cognition that gives us new knowledge can be seen as “theory change.” Now, it can be reasonably objected that cognition, and even thought (in the sense of mediated cognition, see Disentangling Language from Thought) involves processes such as episodic memory, foresight and imagery that are very hard-pressed into the frame of “theorizing.” But we may ignore this, since the distinction that Bloom and Keil (2001) evoke should remain even if we substitute “induces theory change” with “influences thought” in the quotation above.

So what is meant by “linguistic structure” and why should its possible influence on thought be “interesting”? At first look, one may think that this refers to a distinction made already by Whorf (1956) : the more limited effects of lexical items, like calling a barrel with dangerous fumes empty , and the much more pervasive effect of “grammatical patterns” (i.e., morphology and syntax), which are used ubiquitously, and under less conscious control. However, Bloom and Keil (2001) specifically refer to “the particular words” a language has in exemplifying what they mean by structure, which is indeed consistent with the rejection of “a simple dichotomy between lexical and grammatical elements” ( Croft, 2003 , p. 226) in most contemporary linguistics.

In fact, the distinction that the authors are aiming at corresponds to the distinction between the historical (“structure”) and the situated levels (“talk”) of language discussed in the previous section (see Table ​ Table1 1 ). However, while we argued that discourse , or actual situated language use is what has the potential to influence thought, Bloom and Keil (2001) assume that only system-level linguistic differences are worthy of being considered as (interesting) causes of cognitive differences. On the face of it, this is puzzling, since linguistic structures are always realized in discourse (“talk”), and talk is never un-structured. Why should the effects on children’s cognitive development of “what they hear people talking about” be considered trivial? Apparently, since discourse and the knowledge it yields are so pervasive: nearly everything that we learn without direct perceptual experience is linguistically mediated (and more recently, pictorially mediated as well): dinosaurs, angels, Mount Everest, quarks, genes, etc. For example, the word quark denotes a certain class of objects hypothesized by modern physics. By means of the informational content of the term we delineate, if not establish, the concept of the basic constituent of matter. Still, Bloom and Keil (2001) discount such cognitive effects, since words like quark apparently do not constitute a systematic aspect of language.

However, the distinction “information vs. structure” is problematic. As is well-known since at least de Saussure (1916) , the meaning of words in not exhausted by their referential (“informational”) content, but also involves the web of relations to other words. To take the previous example, the words quark , basic , constituent and matter can be seen as systematically interrelated: their meanings are to some degree inter-defined, as well as in relation to the “language game” of modern science that they participate in. To take another example: is it not a structural aspect of English that dinosaurs are (considered to be) reptiles , while elephants are mammals , and so are dolphins , though the latter were thought for a long time to be fish (and still are in many other languages/cultures)? Such structure, as well as that encoded in “grammatical patterns” of language, will of course provide “information” during language learning and everyday use. Thus, the dichotomy between information and structure that Bloom and Keil’s view rests upon cannot be upheld: linguistic information is always structured, and structural distinctions are informative.

Further, if we consider the example of social cognition, used by Bloom and Keil (2001) in the citation above, there is considerable evidence that language contributes strongly to children’s understanding of the concept of belief (and hence of “false beliefs”). Indeed, at least two undeniably structural features of language have been argued to contribute to this: (a) mental predicates such as think , believe , know … and (b) sentential complement constructions such as say that ( de Villiers and Pyers, 1997 ; Astington and Jenkins, 1999 ). On the other hand, others have argued that such features are not the only, and possibly not the primary factors that allow language acquisition to influence social cognition. Tomasello (1999 , p. 173) suggests that typical features of linguistic interaction such as disagreements, repairs and explanations constitute (at least) “three kinds of discourse, each of which requires [children] to take the perspective of another person” ( Lohmann and Tomasello, 2003 ). Finally, Hutto (2008) presents a book-length argument that the crucial aspect of language that leads to proficiency in “folk psychology” are all the stories that children are told. In sum, both structural and informational aspects of language are likely to contribute to developing concepts such as wish, intention, reason, belief, and even more so for interrelating them into discursive and holistic complexes such as “folk psychological narrative.” Since the distinction between “talk” and “structure” (and hence of their possible effects on thought) is highly dubious, there is nothing obviously trivial about the influence of the former.

Let us consider the other prong of the dilemma that Bloom and Keil (2001) set up for linguistic relativity (“interesting, but wrong”). They first point out a standard methodological objection: that Whorf and many who have gone in his footsteps use a circular argumentation where linguistic differences are the sole evidence for cognitive differences. In fact, Whorf was aware of this problem, and pointed out the need for future studies to corroborate his conjectures ( Whorf, 1956 , p. 162). One can say that documenting linguistic diversity is a necessary preliminary step to formulating hypotheses of linguistic influence. We may employ Popper’s (1935) distinction between “context of discovery” and “context of justification,” and regard Whorf as engaged in the first, while modern neo-Whorfians with psychological training clearly aim for the latter:

A full theory of the relation of language diversity to thought necessarily involves at least three logical components . It must distinguish between language and thought in some principled way. It must elaborate the actual mechanisms or manner of influence. And it must indicate to what extent other contextual factors affect the operation of these mechanisms.

( Lucy, 1997 , p. 306, original emphasis)

Still, Bloom and Keil (2001) find faults even with the studies that follow such a procedure. For example, Lucy’s studies in object categorization on the basis of shape vs. material in speakers of different languages did not show differences in 7-years-old children; differences in spatial reasoning such as those of Pederson (1995) can be due to ecological, rather than linguistic differences; showing that language is essential for numerical reasoning ( Dehaene, 1997 ) may also turn out as trivial: “if the task itself requires that the person use inner speech, for instance, then any effect of language on performance is considerably less interesting” ( Bloom and Keil, 2001 , p. 358). Thus, the authors reach the conclusion that has been hinted since the onset of their review: “taken together… the available research does not challenge the mainstream view (ibid: 364)” that language is a module quite separate from thinking, or even more plainly: “the language you speak does not affect how you think” (ibid: 351).

We have spent considerable time on one particular paper, albeit as mentioned an influential one, not so much because we disagree with the factual conclusions of the authors, but because we find its style of reasoning quite typical for “mainstream” cognitive science (e.g., Pinker, 1994 ), where notions of (innate) “modules,” “information processing” and “mental representations” are axiomatic. Since there is no logical possibility for language to influence thought (in any “interesting” way) given such a conceptual apparatus, the strategy is first to split the claim of linguistic influence into “discourse-based” and “structure-based.” The former is then deflated as a truism, while the second is demolished methodologically, or reduced to the trivial variety. Ironically, one could suggest that cognitive scientists like Bloom, Keil, and Pinker are so influenced by the language-based conceptual framework they work with, that their conclusions are (almost) predetermined.

Our main counter-objection to this line of reasoning has been that the distinction between “information” and “structure” corresponds to the distinction between discourse (situated) and language system (historical) in Coseriu’s framework, discussed earlier. Since the two aspects of language presuppose one another, they cannot be opposed as “trivial” vs. “interesting.” Admittedly, different kinds of (possible) linguistic influence on thought need to be distinguished, and some may be more pervasive than others. Thinking of dolphins as mammals might change ways of reasoning (and ethics), but will hardly affect reasoning in other domains. On the other hand, the presence of a linguistic “structure” such as the obligatory grammatical marking of the evidence the speaker has for every proposition (direct experience, inference, hearsay, etc.), a feature of, e.g., Turkish, could turn out to have much more wide-ranging influences. The extent of such influence is what remains to be determined, but to rule it out is clearly premature.

Different Kinds of Theories of Linguistic Influence

By insisting on a qualitative distinction between “interesting” and “trivial” linguistic influence, Bloom and Keil (2001) were in one way atypical: the so-called Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is commonly divided into a “weak” and a “strong” version, as in the following formulations by Brown (1976 , p. 128):

• (1) Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by non-linguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the two languages.
• (2) The structure of anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language.

Can one apply such a distinction to the thesis of linguistic influence on thought in general? The adjectives weak and strong are gradient opposites, entailing the existence of a continuum ranging from approximately zero (“no influence”) to maximum (“complete determinism”). If so, specific theoretical proposals of linguistic influence such as those of Whorf (1956) , Vygotsky (1962) , Lucy (1992) , Levinson (2003) , etc. can in principle be arranged on a cline representing “strength of influence.” The main issue would be to establish which proposal corresponds to the actual position on the cline – and if following the reasoning of Bloom and Keil (2001) it should be somewhere very close to the “no influence” end.

We find such a gradient conception of linguistic influence misleading for at least two related reasons. First, at least four types of (possible) linguistic influence – and corresponding theoretical proposals – differ from each other not quantitatively but qualitatively. Second, at least three of these types of influence are not mutually exclusive or incommensurable with one another, and could potentially all be valid. A similar argument has been made in a recent review article ( Wolff and Holmes, 2011 ), but here we follow the distinctions made by Blomberg and Zlatev (2009) , where theories of linguistic influence on thought are distinguished according to two parameters. The first parameter is context. Whorf’s (1956) principle of linguistic relativity is, for example, context-general: irrespective of the task, context or situation, some particular aspect of language will influence one’s thinking, at least in some particular domains. A context-specific type of influence, on the other hand, gives more freedom to thought, and allows a particular task to be solved either without, or if necessary, with the help of language. The second parameter concerns whether features of particular languages affect thinking ( language-specific ) as in the Whorfian tradition, or if the properties of language that influence thought are so general (e.g., prediction, hierarchical structure) that there would be no differences between language communities in the way that language affects thought ( language-general ), as opposed to the difference of having or not having language. These two parameters/dimensions can be combined, yielding four types of linguistic influence, each represented by a number of theories, as shown in Table ​ Table2 2 .

Four general kinds of theories of linguistic influence on thought (with example references, discussed in the text), categorized on the basis of the binary parameters: Context : general vs. specific and Language : specific vs. general.

As stated, it is not our intention to evaluate in detail each of the theories of linguistic influence categorized in Table ​ Table2 2 . We need, however, say a few words concerning each type for the purpose of justifying our classifications, and to support our claim that not all of these are mutually exclusive. We should also add that these categories are somewhat over-schematic, glossing over distinctions between theories within each type. Still, they serve the purpose of the main point that we are making: that language-upon-thought theories do no fall on a “strong-weak” continuum.

Type 1, classically represented by Whorf (1956) , remains viable as long as there is a plausible “mechanism” according to which linguistic classification can affect thinking so pervasively as to be available in any kind of context and situation. Both Lucy (1992) and Levinson (2003) give explanations for how this could take place: through making the respective distinctions encoded in the language from the onset of language acquisition, and thus in the words of Evans (2010 , Chap. 8), “training thought” to make the corresponding distinctions. In the terms of the divisions made by Wolff and Holmes (2011) , this concerns the roles of language as “spotlight” and “inducer.” Levinson’s findings that speakers of languages using (only) absolute frames of spatial reference, also use these frames in thinking, navigating and gesturing, constitute some of the strongest evidence for a language-specific, context-general type of effect.

Type 2, which is similarly language-specific, but also context-specific, may be represented by Slobin’s (1996 , p. 76) thinking for speaking hypothesis, according to which linguistic structure (see “Interesting” and “Trivial” Kinds of Language Influence?) affects the “thought that is mobilized for speaking.” Slobin does not exclude more general effects, but has focused on what is apparently the most obvious context of linguistic influence: the distinctions that are made while using language. This may be a rock-bottom of linguistic influence, since even well-known opponents of the thesis of linguistic influence seem to accept it: “one’s language does determine how one must conceptualize reality when one has to talk about it” ( Pinker, 1989 , p. 360). Other theories within this category make more substantive proposals. Pederson’s (1995 ) study of Tamil speakers who preferentially used either relative or absolute frames of reference (unlike Levinson’s more mono-frame speakers of Guugu Yimithirr), displayed only a strong tendency to solve the spatial task in a manner that corresponded to their preferred linguistic usage. Thus, Pederson (1995 , p. 54) concludes that language cannot be used as “obligatory means,” but only optionally: “Under the weaker language as optional means hypothesis, the experimental results suggest a significant, close and variable relationship between language and thought.” Another testified effect that could be grouped here as a “stronger,” but still context-specific type of influence, are the findings that English speakers could be induced after relatively short periods of exposure to think of time in terms of Greek-style CONTAINER metaphors (‘large’ and ‘small’ quantities of time) and thus “override” the conventional LENGTH metaphors of ‘short’ and ‘long’ distances of time used in their native tongue ( Casasanto et al., 2004 ). With respect to Wolff and Holmes (2011) classification, this could be seen as an instance of language as “meddler,” with linguistic representations influencing non-linguistic cognition differently on different occasions, depending on multiple factors that for the sake of simplicity we may call context . Lupyan’s (2012) “label-feedback hypothesis,” aiming to account for both the pervasiveness of language-cognition effects and for their fragile character (e.g., they are easily disrupted by verbal interference), would also fall within this category of theories, as shown in the methodological conclusion: “in may be more productive to measure the degree to which performance on specific tasks is being modulated by language, modulated differently by different languages, or is truly independent of any experimental manipulations that can be termed linguistic” (ibid: 10).

Turning to the language-general, non-relativist type of linguistic influence, Type 3 represents the possibility that was discussed (and rejected) in Section “Disentangling Language from Thought”: that language more or less “creates” thought, or even consciousness. Perhaps the foremost representative of this position in the current debate is Dennett (1991) , with his famous (if rather mysterious) claim that:

Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a von Neumannesque virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for such activities.

( Dennett, 1991 , p. 210)

Macphail (1998) attempts to justify such a claim empirically by considering (and discounting) various evidence for animal consciousness. It is somewhat unclear if this implies returning to the discredited Cartesian view of animals as “mindless automata” and if this also applies to pre-linguistic children. In any case, even if Type 3 is conceptually problematic, ethically detestable and empirically implausible ( Griffin and Speck, 2004 ), it is worth considering as part of the global picture, striking out a (remote) space of possibilities.

Finally, Type 4 is the much more palatable version of linguistic influence often associated with the notion of linguistic mediation of Vygotsky (1962 , 1978 ). According to this view, language is analogous to a tool insofar as it enables us to solve a certain task more easily than would have been the case if the same task were approached with non-linguistic thought. Differences between languages may be less relevant (though should not be excluded) than the fact of using, or not using language. For example, Zlatev et al. (2010) found that Swedish and French speakers solved a non-linguistic task involving the categorization of animated motion events in a similar way when they described these events prior to the similarity judgement. This was despite relevant semantic differences between the languages that would have been expected to lead to different similarity judgments, in a Type 2, thinking-for-speaking scenario. Also, Tomasello’s (1999) argument that the “perspectival” nature of linguistic symbols and certain forms of discourse, mentioned in the previous section, play an important role for bringing about the understanding of others as “mental agents” with beliefs, intentions and emotions, can also be regarded as belonging to this class of language-general, context-specific effects on thought.

To repeat, distinguishing types of linguistic influence in the manner proposed here may be too schematic, but it serves the purpose of our particular argument: to show that it is conceptually inaccurate and analytically impossible to order effects and corresponding theories in a cline from “weak” to “strong.” While it may be possible to do so in some cases, within each cell in Table ​ Table2 2 , one would have to formulate carefully the “metric” for such ordering. Of the four major types of linguistic influence, Types 1, 2, and 4 appear to be both possible, and in some particular cases: actual . Hence, they are not mutually exclusive.

The topic of the relation of language on thought, and in particular the thesis that language influences thought in one or several different ways, is somewhat like that of language origins. First, it has an old pedigree. Second, it fascinates people, and has over the years given rise to many theories, some more plausible than others. Third, it has at times been more or less “banned” due to presumably irresolvable conceptual and methodological problems. In this chapter, we have above all addressed the final point: it is not that anyone has explicitly banned discussion on linguistic influence, in the manner that La societé de linguistique de Paris banned papers on language origins in 1886, but there have been persistent attempts to question the viability of the whole research program ( Pinker, 1994 ; Bloom and Keil, 2001 ; Björk, 2008 ; McWhorter, 2014 ).

We have focused on four such attempts, and have argued against them: (1) that it is impossible to disentangle language and thought; (2) that it is impossible to disentangle language from culture and social interaction; (3) that only “trivial” forms of linguistic influence are viable; (4) that all possible forms of linguistic influence can be aligned on a weak-to-strong cline, and the task is to establish which place on the cline is best supported by the evidence. In contrast, we maintained that (1’) it is indeed possible to distinguish language and thought conceptually, since thought (understood as “mediated cognition”) is possible without language; (2’) language is an essential aspect of culture, and is realized through discourse, but this does not invalidate the possibility of cultural influences on thought being separate from language, and vice versa; furthermore, the notion of “language” should be analyzed on several levels and perspectives (see Table ​ Table1 1 ), allowing us to avoid dichotomies like langue/parole, system/discourse or structure/information (3’) the distinction between “trivial” and “interesting” influence stems from a particular view on language and cognition that can be questioned; (4’) at least four different types of linguistic influence can be distinguished, with qualitative differences between them, and that three of these are both feasible and not mutually exclusive.

As they say, the jury is still out on the more empirical claims concerning the influence of language of thought, and our goal has not been to argue in favor of one or another specific mechanism. Rather the aim has been to show that such influence is possible , in several different forms. Our hope is that this conclusion, and the conceptual clarifications upon which it rests, may contribute to further careful investigations in order to establish which of these is actual .

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Martin Thiering, who edited a special issue of Zeitschrift für Semiotik 35 (1-2) devoted to “Die Neo-Whorfian Theorie” where a predecessor to the present article appeared in German. We also thank Alexander Lakow for some helpful comments on an intermediary version. Finally, the comments of the two reviewers for this journal have led to significant improvements, for which we are grateful.

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3.1: Linguistic Relativity- The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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• Manon Allard-Kropp
• University of Missouri–St. Louis

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Learning Objectives

After completing this module, students will be able to:

1. Define the concept of linguistic relativity

2. Differentiate linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism

3. Define the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (against more pop-culture takes on it) and situate it in a broader theoretical context/history

4. Provide examples of linguistic relativity through examples related to time, space, metaphors, etc.

In this part, we will look at language(s) and worldviews at the intersection of language & thoughts and language & cognition (i.e., the mental system with which we process the world around us, and with which we learn to function and make sense of it). Our main question, which we will not entirely answer but which we will examine in depth, is a chicken and egg one: does thought determine language, or does language inform thought?

We will talk about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; look at examples that support the notion of linguistic relativity (pronouns, kinship terms, grammatical tenses, and what they tell us about culture and worldview); and then we will more specifically look into how metaphors are a structural component of worldview, if not cognition itself; and we will wrap up with memes. (Can we analyze memes through an ethnolinguistic, relativist lens? We will try!)

3.1 Linguistic Relativity: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

In the 1920s, Benjamin Whorf was a graduate student studying with linguist Edward Sapir at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Sapir, considered the father of American linguistic anthropology, was responsible for documenting and recording the languages and cultures of many Native American tribes, which were disappearing at an alarming rate. This was due primarily to the deliberate efforts of the United States government to force Native Americans to assimilate into the Euro-American culture. Sapir and his predecessors were well aware of the close relationship between culture and language because each culture is reflected in and influences its language. Anthropologists need to learn the language of the culture they are studying in order to understand the world view of its speakers. Whorf believed that the reverse is also true, that a language affects culture as well, by actually influencing how its speakers think. His hypothesis proposes that the words and the structures of a language influence how its speakers think about the world, how they behave, and ultimately the culture itself. (See our definition of culture in Part 1 of this document.) Simply stated, Whorf believed that human beings see the world the way they do because the specific languages they speak influence them to do so.

He developed this idea through both his work with Sapir and his work as a chemical engineer for the Hartford Insurance Company investigating the causes of fires. One of his cases while working for the insurance company was a fire at a business where there were a number of gasoline drums. Those that contained gasoline were surrounded by signs warning employees to be cautious around them and to avoid smoking near them. The workers were always careful around those drums. On the other hand, empty gasoline drums were stored in another area, but employees were more careless there. Someone tossed a cigarette or lighted match into one of the “empty” drums, it went up in flames, and started a fire that burned the business to the ground. Whorf theorized that the meaning of the word empty implied to the worker that “nothing” was there to be cautious about so the worker behaved accordingly. Unfortunately, an “empty” gasoline drum may still contain fumes, which are more flammable than the liquid itself.

Whorf ’s studies at Yale involved working with Native American languages, including Hopi. The Hopi language is quite different from English, in many ways. For example, let’s look at how the Hopi language deals with time. Western languages (and cultures) view time as a flowing river in which we are being carried continuously away from a past, through the present, and into a future. Our verb systems reflect that concept with specific tenses for past, present, and future. We think of this concept of time as universal, that all humans see it the same way. A Hopi speaker has very different ideas and the structure of their language both reflects and shapes the way they think about time. The Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense. Instead, it divides the world into what Whorf called the manifested and unmanifest domains. The manifested domain deals with the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past and future; the verb system uses the same basic structure for all of them. The unmanifest domain involves the remote past and the future, as well as the world of desires, thought, and life forces. The set of verb forms dealing with this domain are consistent for all of these areas, and are different from the manifested ones. Also, there are no words for hours, 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 work or other events. It is simply not how they had been conditioned to behave with respect to time in their Hopi world, which followed the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun.

In a book about the Abenaki who lived in Vermont in the mid-1800s, Trudy Ann Parker described their concept of time, which very much resembled that of the Hopi and many of the other Native American tribes. “They called one full day a sleep, and a year was called a winter. Each month was referred to as a moon and always began with a new moon. An Indian day wasn’t divided into minutes or hours. It had four time periods—sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight. Each season was determined by the budding or leafing of plants, the spawning of fish, or the rutting time for animals. Most Indians thought the white race had been running around like scared rabbits ever since the invention of the clock.”

The lexicon , or vocabulary, of a language is an inventory of the items a culture talks about and has categorized in order to make sense of the world and deal with it effectively. For example, modern life is dictated for many by the need to travel by some kind of vehicle—cars, trucks, SUVs, trains, buses, etc. We therefore have thousands of words to talk about them, including types of vehicles, models, brands, or parts.

The most important aspects of each culture are similarly reflected in the lexicon of its language. Among the societies living in the islands of Oceania in the Pacific, fish have great economic and cultural importance. 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, in Palau there are about 1,000 fish species and Palauan fishermen knew, long before biologists existed, details about the anatomy, behavior, growth patterns, and habitat of most of them—in many cases far more than modern biologists know even today. Much of fish behavior is related to the tides and the phases of the moon. Throughout Oceania, the names given to certain days of the lunar months reflect the likelihood of successful fishing. For example, in the Caroline Islands, the name for the night before the new moon is otolol , which means “to swarm.” The name indicates that the best fishing days cluster around the new moon. In Hawai`i and Tahiti two sets of days have names containing the particle `ole or `ore ; one occurs in the first quarter of the moon and the other in the third quarter. The same name is given to the prevailing wind during those phases. The words mean “nothing,” because those days were considered bad for fishing as well as planting.

Parts of Whorf ’s hypothesis, known as linguistic relativity , were controversial from the beginning, and still are among some linguists. Yet Whorf ’s ideas now form the basis for an entire sub-field of cultural anthropology: cognitive or psychological anthropology. A number of studies have been done that support Whorf ’s ideas. Linguist George Lakoff ’s work looks at the pervasive existence of metaphors in everyday speech that can be said to predispose a speaker’s world view and attitudes on a variety of human experiences. A metaphor is an expression in which one kind of thing is understood and experienced in terms of another entirely unrelated thing; the metaphors in a language can reveal aspects of the culture of its speakers. Take, for example, the concept of an argument. In logic and philosophy, an argument is a discussion involving differing points of view, or a debate. But the conceptual metaphor in American culture can be stated as ARGUMENT IS WAR. This metaphor is reflected in many expressions of the everyday language of American speakers: I won the argument. He shot down every point I made. They attacked every argument we made. Your point is right on target . I had a fight with my boyfriend last night. In other words, we use words appropriate for discussing war when we talk about arguments, which are certainly not real war. But we actually think of arguments as a verbal battle that often involve anger, and even violence, which then structures how we argue.

To illustrate that this concept of argument is not universal, Lakoff suggests imagining a culture where an argument is not something to be won or lost, with no strategies for attacking or defending, but rather as a dance where the dancers’ goal is to perform in an artful, pleasing way. No anger or violence would occur or even be relevant to speakers of this language, because the metaphor for that culture would be ARGUMENT IS DANCE.

3.1 Adapted from Perspectives , Language ( Linda Light, 2017 )

You can either watch the video, How Language Shapes the Way We Think, by linguist Lera Boroditsky, or read the script below.

Watch the video: How Language Shapes the Way We Think ( Boroditsky, 2018)

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world—and they all have different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language—from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian—that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. “The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,” Boroditsky says. “Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.”

Video transcript:

So, I’ll be speaking to you using language ... because I can. This is one these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. So what I’m doing right now is, I’m making sounds with my mouth as I’m exhaling. I’m making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they’re hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. I hope.

I hope that’s happening. So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time. We’re able to transmit knowledge across minds. I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say, “Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics.”

Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven’t had that thought before.

But now I’ve just made you think it, through language.

Now of course, there isn’t just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures—very importantly, different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? Now, this is an ancient question. People have been speculating about this question forever. Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, “To have a second language is to have a second soul”—strong statement that language crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn’t craft reality.

These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years. But until recently, there hasn’t been any data to help us decide either way. Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we’ve started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question.

So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I’ll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had a chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What’s cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don’t use words like “left” and “right,” and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, “Oh, there’s an ant on your southwest leg.” Or, “Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit.” In fact, the way that you say “hello” in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, “Which way are you going?” And the answer should be, “North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?”

So imagine as you’re walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction.

But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn’t get past “hello,” if you didn’t know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: “Oh, we don’t have magnets in our beaks or in our scales.” No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well.

And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast.

Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don’t know which way it is myself—

You have not been a lot of help.

So let’s just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group—very distinguished group like you guys—doesn’t know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know.

There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left.

But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? They don’t use words like “left” and “right.” Let me give you hint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What’s the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn’t actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I’m facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I’m facing this way, then time goes this way. I’m facing this way, time goes this way— very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It’s a dramatically different way of thinking about time.

Here’s another really smart human trait. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. Well, I bet I know how you’d solve that problem if you solved it. You went, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.” You counted them. You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins. This is a little trick that you’re taught to use as kids. You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it. A little linguistic trick. Well, some languages don’t do this, because some languages don’t have exact number words. They’re languages that don’t have a word like “seven” or a word like “eight.” In fact, people who speak these languages don’t count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting. But folks who don’t have that linguistic trait can’t do that.

Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum—the visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, “light” and “dark.” And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there’s a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn’t a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, goluboy , and dark blue, siniy . So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors. When we test people’s ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They’re faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and a dark blue. And when you look at people’s brains as they’re looking at colors—say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue—the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, “Ooh, something has categorically changed,” whereas the brains of English speakers, for example, that don’t make this categorical distinction, don’t give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing.

Languages have all kinds of structural quirks. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languages have grammatical gender; so every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? Actually, it turns out that’s the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here—“bridge” happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish—German speakers are more likely to say bridges are “beautiful,” “elegant,” and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they’re “strong” or “long,” these masculine words.

Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? You take an event like this, an accident. In English, it’s fine to say, “He broke the vase.” In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, “The vase broke,” or “The vase broke itself.” If it’s an accident, you wouldn’t say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, “I broke my arm.” Now, in lots of languages, you couldn’t use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm—[laughter] and you succeeded. If it was an accident, you would use a different construction.

Now, this has consequences. So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, “He did it; he broke the vase.” Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it’s an accident, but they’re more likely to remember that it was an accident. They’re more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, “He broke the vase,” as opposed to “The vase broke,” even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, “He broke it,” as opposed to, “It broke.” The language guides our reasoning about events.

Now, I’ve given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deep effects—that’s what we saw with the case of number. Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. Of course, if you don’t count, you can’t do algebra, you can’t do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm.

Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all the time, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broad effects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language can shape how you’re thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. That’s a lot of stuff.

And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us—ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. These are important things in our daily lives.

Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000—there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And we can create many more—languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. The tragic thing is that we’re losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. We’re losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world’s languages will be gone in the next hundred years. And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. That excludes almost all humans. Right? So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better.

I want to leave you with this final thought. I’ve told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that’s not about how people elsewhere think. It’s about how you think. It’s how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, “Why do I think the way that I do?” “How could I think differently?” And also, “What thoughts do I wish to create?”

Thank you very much.

Read the following text on what lexical differences between language can tell us about those languages’ cultures.