Sapir-Whorf and ‘verbal hygiene’

The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an important driver of debates over verbal hygiene, or what some call ‘politically correct language’. Consider the following advertisement for a job at a fictional university:

Lecturer in Linguistics – University of Histown

The University of Histown Department of Linguistics seeks a full-time Lecturer in Linguistics. The successful candidate will take up his duties at the start of the next academic year, and he will be expected to take a full part in the teaching, administration and research activities of the department. His remuneration will be determined on the basis of his responsibilites and experience.

The pronouns and possessive adjectives (he, his) are all masculine forms, which have traditionally been used in a gender-neutral way in formal English (e.g. everyone took his place) and do not therefore imply that only male candidates will be considered. Nonetheless, the consistent use of masculine forms subtly suggests that Histown University is something of a ‘boys’ club’ in which women are not welcome, and this might well deter able female candidates from applying for the post. Furthermore, as has often been pointed out, some supposedly ‘gender-neutral’ forms are in fact nothing of the kind: ‘Some men are female’ sounds odd, while ‘Some human beings are female’ does not; ‘Each applicant is to list the name of his spouse’ is similarly strange and sounds better with ‘his or her’.

For this reason, job advertisements like the one above are largely a thing of the past. Employers are required to use gender-inclusive language wherever possible, and terms like fireman, barman and stewardess are generally being replaced by firefighter, bartender and flight attendant (though not everyone accepts postie for postman); many actresses now prefer the gender-neutral actor.

Many European languages have what is known as a T/V distinction in which the second person singular form (e.g. tu in French, du in Swedish) is used with familiars and intimates while its plural equivalent (vous French; ni Swedish), when used with a single addressee, is more formal. The social values which the T/V distinction encodes vary considerably, however: using tu to a stranger in France would be perceived as rude, while the use of ni to one person in Swedish would generally appear odd or old-fashioned. These values are, moreover, subject to change: a famous paper by Brown and Gilman showed how the use of tu and vous in French had shifted considerably in the post-war years, with vous increasingly marking social distance rather than social superiority. Non-reciprocal T/V usage (a boss might once have demanded vous from staff while giving tu) was increasingly avoided in favour of reciprocal T or V use. A society aspiring to greater egalitarianism had begun to signal this by using its linguistic signs differently: the language had not prevented its members from conceiving an alternative social structure. The categories of our language may incline us to perceive the world in a certain way, but they do not make us do so and we can choose to see things differently. We need to be vigilant, in other words, in identifying the ‘conceptual fetters’.

Language and world view

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that our view of the world is dictated by the categories of our mother tongue. Few linguists today would accept it in its strong form, but a weaker version of the hypothesis has influenced the drive for non-discriminatory language.