The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The Descriptivists dismissed anything but the description of languages in their own terms as unhelpful speculation – ‘loose talk’ in Joos’s words – and emphasized linguistic diversity rather than universal principles. From this firmly relativist position emerged what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, though it was not actually formalized in their lifetimes. This hypothesis held that languages were not only all structurally different, but that individuals’ fundamental perception of reality is moulded by the language they speak. Consider an early statement to this effect from Sapir:

…the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

He would later describe language as something that ‘defines experience for us’ and talk of the ‘tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world’. Sapir’s student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, claimed that the Hopi language of Arizona encoded a very different world view from that of what he called the ‘Standard Average European’, notably with respect to the expression of time. Hopi, he claimed, ‘may be called a timeless language’: its verbs lacked tense marking comparable to that of European languages, and there were neither terms for countable temporal units (days, hours, minutes) nor spatial metaphors to express time reference (cf. between the sheets/between 8pm and 10pm; in the water/in the afternoon). All this reflected for Whorf a concept of time that was radically different from those with which Standard Average Europeans are familiar. Echoing his mentor, he famously concluded:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. 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 kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of 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.

Critics of Whorf have noted that his claims as they stand are not testable: the Hopi concept of time might in fact be similar to those of Europeans, but merely expressed in a very different way. Another objection is that it is difficult to see how a world view shaped by one’s language can change, because individuals would not be able to think outside the categories that language provides. Yet human beings can and do change their perspectives on the world, understand concepts from other languages and create new ones. We are hardly, then, ‘prisoners’ of our language, as the hypothesis would have us believe:

Sapir and Whorf understimate the ability that individual men possess to break conceptual fetters which other men have forged.

Other objections challenge the relativist position of Sapir and Whorf, according to which each language must be viewed strictly on its own terms. They argue instead for innate or universal conceptual categories. But while most linguists would now, for a variety of reasons, reject the strong version of the hypothesis, many would nonetheless accept a weaker version, which sees language as subtly influencing our modes of thought. The highly developed system of honorific registers in Japanese, for example, reflects a socially stratified society in which relative social status is important, but it may also lead one to think of that social organization as in some way ‘natural’, or at least, disincline one to question it. Speakers of a language that insists on feminine and masculine personal forms may be more accepting of gender roles in society than speakers of a language which does not. Wierzbicka notes that attempts by Polish communist governments to discourage use of the gendered address forms pan/pani (‘sir/madam’) in favor of the second person plural wy foundered because the genderless form sounded cold and impolite.