LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
A theory of the relationship between speech and thought associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, and sometimes termed the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The term is often used to cover two distinct theories:
linguistic relativity: a view that each language has categories and distinctions which are unique to it;
linguistic determinism: a view that the way in which we perceive and categorise the world is shaped by the language we speak.
The Hypothesis arose from anthropological work among speakers of Polynesian, North American Indian and Eskimo languages. The researchers adopted the questionable assumption that concepts not represented in the languages they studied were absent from the world view of the people who spoke them.
Today’s view is that all human beings have access to basic concepts, but that languages differ in whether they codify (give form to) a particular concept or not. Thus, English codifies many more types of walking than most languages (WALK, STROLL, AMBLE, LOITER, WANDER, SCURRY, MARCH etc.); but speakers of other languages are still capable of recognising the concepts involved.
A major test for linguistic determinism was found in the fact that languages divide up the colour spectrum differently. If it could be shown that we do not all perceive the spectrum in the same way, it would suggest that our perception of the real world is indeed shaped by the way in which our language classifies and subcategorises it. In fact, research suggests that focal points (prototypes) for particular colours are not only shared by speakers of the same language, but are also shared across languages. There is agreement on ‘typical values’ for colours even where a language possesses fewer colour terms than English.
Directly opposed to linguistic relativity is a widely held view that language universals underlie the way in which languages encode reality. Some commentators would see these universals as deriving from the similar life experiences that human beings share across cultures. Others might attribute them to the fact that all human beings possess similar cognitive faculties and thus similar ways of viewing the world and organising information.
See also: Colour systems, Concept, Language universals
Further reading: Berlin and Kay (1969); Palmer (1981); Ungerer and Schmid (1996)
