Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. This controversial hypothesis is named after the linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.

History of the concept

The axiom that language has controlling effects upon thought can be traced to Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium" (On the comparative study of languages), and the notion has been largely assimilated into Western thought. Karl Kerenyi began his 1976 English language translation of Dionysus with this passage:

Related Topics:
Axiom - Thought - Wilhelm von Humboldt - Essay - Karl Kerenyi - 1976 - English language - Translation

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:"The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages are not so much a means of expressing truth that has already been established as means of discovering truth that was previously unknown. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways of looking at the world."

Related Topics:
Speech - Truth - Sound - Sign

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The origin of the SWH as a more rigorous examination of this familiar cultural perception can be traced back to the work of Franz Boas, the founder of anthropology in the United States. Boas was educated in Germany in the late 19th century at a time when scientists such as Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann were attempting to understand the physiology of sensation.

Related Topics:
Cultural - Perception - Franz Boas - Anthropology - United States - Germany - 19th century - Scientist - Ernst Mach - Ludwig Boltzmann - Physiology

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One important philosophical approach at the time was a revival of interest in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant claimed that knowledge was the result of concrete cognitive work on the part of an individual person—reality ("sensuous intuition") was inherently in flux and understanding resulted when someone took that intuition and interpreted it via their "categories of the understanding." Different individuals may thus perceive the same noumenal reality as phenomenal instances of their different, individual concepts.

Related Topics:
Philosophical - Immanuel Kant - Cognitive - Noumenal - Phenomenal

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In the United States, Boas encountered Native American languages from many different linguistic families—all of which were quite different from the Semitic and Indo-European languages which most European scholars studied. Boas came to realize how greatly ways of life and grammatical categories could vary from one place to another. As a result he came to believe that the culture and lifeways of a people were reflected in the language that they spoke.

Related Topics:
Native American languages - Linguistic - Semitic - Indo-European languages - Europe - Scholar

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Sapir was one of Boas's star students. He furthered Boas's argument by noting that languages were systematic, formally complete systems. Thus, it was not this or that particular word that expressed a particular mode of thought or behavior, but that the coherent and systematic nature of language interacted at a wider level with thought and behavior. While his views changed over time, it seems that towards the end of his life Sapir came to believe that language did not merely mirror culture and habitual action, but that language and thought might in fact be in a relationship of mutual influence or perhaps even determination.

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Whorf gave this idea greater precision by examining the particular grammatical mechanisms by which thought influenced language. He argued his point thus:

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:"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... all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."

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::— (Language, Thought and Reality pp. 212–214).

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Whorf's formulation of this "principle of linguistic relativity" is often stereotyped as a "prisonhouse" view of language in which one's thinking and behavior is completely and utterly shaped by one's language. While some people might make this "vulgar Whorfian" argument, Whorf himself sought merely to insist that thought and action were linguistically and socially mediated. In doing so he opposed what he called a "natural logic" position which he claimed believed "talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to 'express' what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically" (Language, Thought and Reality p. 207). On this account, he argued, "thought does not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe" (Language, Thought and Reality p. 208).

Related Topics:
Principle of linguistic relativity - Stereotype - Argument - Logic - Reason - Universe

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Whorf's close analysis of the differences between English and (in one famous instance) the Hopi language raised the bar for an analysis of the relationship between language, thought, and reality by relying on close analysis of grammatical structure, rather than a more impressionistic account of the differences between, say, vocabulary items in a language. A good example of the SWH in action comes from Whorf's own work. Whorf was a chemist by training and worked in the insurance industry as a fire prevention engineer. It was on the basis of the SWH he made the historic shift of labeling things likely to ignite as "flammable" rather than "inflammable" since his research showed that most people incorrectly understood "inflammable" to mean "incapable of catching on fire" rather than "capable of having flames come into it." This resulted in fewer fires as people treated flammable objects with caution rather than assuming that they would not catch fire.

Related Topics:
Analysis - Hopi language - Fire

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As a result of his status outside the academy Whorf's work on linguistic relativity, conducted largely in the late 1930s, did not become popular until the posthumous publication of his writings in the 1950s. In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown created the Loglan constructed language (which led to an offshoot Lojban) in order to test the hypothesis. Linguistic theories of the 1960s— such as those proposed by Noam Chomsky —focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result Whorf's work fell out of favor. In the late 1980s and early 1990s advances in cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics renewed interest in the SWH. An example of a recent Chomskian approach to this issue is Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct, while a more 'Whorfian' approach might be represented by authors such as George Lakoff, who have argued that political arguments, for instance, are shaped by the web of conceptual metaphors that underlie language use. Today researchers disagree — often intensely— about how strongly language influences thought. However, this disagreement has sparked increasing interest in the issue and a great deal of innovative and important research.

Related Topics:
1930 - 1950s - 1955 - Dr. James Cooke Brown - Loglan - Constructed language - Lojban - 1960s - Noam Chomsky - 1980 - 1990s - Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct - George Lakoff

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