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Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic relativity, also referred to as the Whorfian hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that one's conceptions of reality, and possibly thought itself, are affected by the first learned language. It holds that people perceive the world through the language used first in thinking and communicating. This entry considers the historical development of the concept and the controversy surrounding it.

Initial Development

Beginning with Aristotle, classic Western philosophy held the nominalist position that the language in which philosophy was created was immaterial to its outcome: Thought was not affected by language, and translating between thought and language was not a fundamental problem. Ernst Cassirer's work in philosophy in the early 20th century ran counter to this doctrine, suggesting that humans create their own universe of symbolic meaning that structures and shapes their perceptions of reality. Edward Sapir's work in linguistic anthropology furthered the notion, suggesting that thought and language were intertwined though not causally related. Benjamin Lee Whorf, an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and expert linguist, developed his initial ideas concerning the relationship of language and thought independently, lecturing on these ideas and other topics throughout the 1920s. In 1928 Whorf met Sapir, who read one of Whorf's papers in 1930 and suggested it should be published. Whorf began attending Sapir's classes in Anthropology at Yale in 1931, entering the doctoral program later that year. Whorf never finished doctoral work though he became the central figure in the program after Sapir became ill. He taught at Yale only briefly, preferring to support himself from his business activities while studying and writing after hours.

Both Sapir and Whorf were intrigued by Albert Einstein's concept of relativity and considered applying it to the relationship of thought and language. Throughout the 1930s, Whorf produced a series of papers detailing his ideas, many of which were not published until 1956, well after his early death in 1941. Linguistic relativity, the term initially coined by Sapir who died in 1939, denotes one portion of the set of twelve theoretical positions relating language and thought in Whorf's writings. Once published, the ideas were met with enthusiasm and with harsh criticism. As a result, two distinct notions of linguistic relativity exist, that proposed by Whorf and Sapir, and that criticized by their detractors.

Whorf's Version of Linguistic Relativity

Whorf's principal goal was to explore the nature of consciousness and the human mind through studying language. He was among the first to argue that communication, in the form of speaking in a language, makes humans human. Regarding the mind as capable of nonlinguistic thought, he saw the majority of human thought and its most important features as linguistic in character. His concerns were with the relationship of language to experience and particularly with linguistic versus nonlinguistic interpretations of experience. Whorf recognized language and thought as separate, but saw their various manifestations as interrelated. His writings on linguistic relativity hold that our Weltanschauung or worldview is related to the structure of our native language rather than being organized solely by observable properties of the world. Like Sapir, Whorf argued that people organize their experience of events in certain ways not because of some intrinsic order of events in the world, but because language provides a kind of agreement about how the world should be understood. He believed that structural differences between different language systems are associated with parallel nonlinguistic cognitive differences in the native speakers of the language, the form of which he left unspecified. Thus, he held that the world is experienced and conceived differently in different language communities. This version is sometimes called the weak linguistic relativity hypothesis.

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