Linguistic Relativity

At our last class meeting for 802, I had some people approach me after class to further discuss the at times controversial subject of linguistic relativity. The theory of linguistic relativity, which is tied to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, is the idea that an individual's linguistic, cultural, and life experience background can hold some bearing on his/her way of thinking. In a determinist approach, a theorist might say that the majority of an individual's thought patterns and eventual decisions are based on this linguistic and cultural background. In the more common theory of linguistic relativity takes a weaker stance that while these things may have some influence on some situations, they by far will not determine an individual's general cognition.

For example, a lot of papers on this topic deal with issues of tangible senses across languages. Did you know that is some languages, there are only two colors--dark and light. There are no words for red, green, purple, blue, etc. Would that affect the way a person views the world?

Some papers deal with the way languages describe space and a person's location in it. In English, we have the small-scale ideas of items being relativistically located to one's right or left, but the big scale ideas of buildings being located to the north, south, east or west. However, some languages lack one or the other--everything is described in either relative terms (i.e., right, left, in front of, behind, etc.) or definite terms (i.e. north of, south of, east of, west of). Would that affect the way a person constructs a mental model or metaphor of the world?

In English, the typical metaphor for time is that we move forward through it, boldly going where no man has gone before. So when we look ahead, we are looking into the future. In some Native American languages, the metaphor could go something like this: a person is standing in a river facing downstream. The future is upstream--this makes sense when you consider that the future is unknown until it comes to pass. In these languages, the metaphors make reference to the future being behind a person, where it cannot be seen, whereas the past is in front and seen, and ever moving away. How would that affect those mental models?

Before you say how weird those languages must be, please know that English is actually the weird one out in terms of world languages. Most languages don't have as many words for color as English does. And most languages describe things in definite terms. So please remember to take a step outside the belief that English is "normal" or "easy" before reading any of these papers--English is really pretty exotic on several fronts as languages go.

For further reading, I highly recommend starting with the overview of linguistic relativity presented on wikipedia: Linguistic Relativity.

For further reading, these are the articles that most of my teachers taught in class during my undergraduate career. A lot of them are very popular, and there is a lot on the topic posted on the web, so I suggest anyone that's interested pokes around some:

BERLIN, BRENT & PAUL KAY (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

GUMPERZ, JOHN, & STEPHEN LEVINSON EDS. (1996). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

KAY, PAUL & CHAD K. MCDANIEL (1978). "The Linguistic Significance of Meanings of Basic Color Terms.". Language 54: 610-646.

LAKOFF, GEORGE (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things. University Of Chicago Press.

LEVINSON, STEPHEN C. (1996). "Language and Space". Annual review of Anthropology 25: 353-82.

LUCY, JOHN A. (1992a). Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LUCY, JOHN A. (1992b). Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MALOTKI, EKKEHART (1983). Werner Winter. ed. "Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language". Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers) 20.

PULLUM, GEOFFREY (1991). The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. Chicaco University Press. http://users.utu.fi/freder/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf.

WHORF, BENJAMIN (1956). John B. Carroll (ed.). ed. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press.