Development of the Hypothesis

Many academic disciplines refer to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (also known as the Whorfian thesis)
when accounting for the differences in languages across cultures (J. B. Carroll, 1956). Benjamin L.
Whorf (1897–1941), a successful fire prevention engineer at the Hartford Fire Insurance Company,
came into contact with the noted linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) through a
course that Sapir (1921) was teaching at Yale. Largely self-taught, Whorf had studied ancient
Hebraic, Aztec, and Mayan cultures, and in the 1930s he went to the U.S. Southwest to study the
Hopi's Uto-Aztecan language. Among Whorf's observations were that the Hopi do not

pluralize nouns referring to time, such as days and years. Instead, time is viewed as a duration.
use words denoting phases of a cycle, such as summer as a phase of a year, as nouns. Whorf
suggested that the Hopi view of time is the perpetual “getting later” of time.
see time as linear in that there are no tenses in the language. Whorf observed that the Hopi have
no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer to time.

Whorf's papers, written in the 1930s on the Hopi language, produced exact and documented
expression of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that reality is embedded in culture's language and that
language then controls thought and cultural norms. Each of us lives not in the midst of the whole
world but only in that part of the world that our language permits us to know. Thus, the world as each
of us knows it is predetermined by the language of our culture. And the differences between languages
represent basic differences in the worldview of diverse cultures.
Focus on Theory 5.1
 Chomsky and Generative Grammar
Based on the observation that children learn their native languages so easily and quickly, major linguists, such as Noam
Chomsky (1980), argue that all human brains have an innate set of linguistic principles, or Universal Grammar, that underlies
the structure of all languages. This approach, known as generative grammar, studies grammar as innately possessed.
Children need only learn the parochial features of their native languages. From this perspective, cultural differences in
language are superficial.

Vocabulary
One level of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is vocabulary. You can assume that if a language has a
particularly rich vocabulary for a thing or activity in comparison to other languages, that thing or
activity is important in that culture. The most commonly used example is Eskimo and snow—although
this example also has been challenged.

The name Eskimo was first applied to the peoples of the Arctic by a Jesuit who heard people using
the word eskimantsik, which means “eaters of raw meat or fish.” Alaska has three native groups: the
Aleuts in the Alaska Peninsula and islands beyond; Indians such as the Athapaskan, Haida, and
Tlingit; and Eskimo groups such as the Chugach, Koniag, Yupik, and Inupiat, known as the Inuit in
Canada and the Inupik in Siberia. It was said that Eskimo languages have many words for different
kinds of snow:

Because the language has many separate single words to refer to different kinds of snow, then snow
must be an important part of these groups' lives (Birke-Smith, 1959). Notice that other languages,
such as English, may require several words to describe the same thing. Speakers of diverse languages
can perceive all these different conditions of snow—it's just that the Eskimo peoples have more
separate single words to refer to these different conditions. The challenge to this example contends
that single English words such as blizzard, dusting, and avalanche exist as equivalents to the Eskimo
words.

In a like way, the Hanunoo tribe of the Philippines has 92 separate single words to refer to rice. In
fact, in most of the languages of Asia, one word means both food and rice. Using the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, you can assume that rice is important in these cultures.

Speakers of Guguyimadjir in the Australian state of Queensland have no words for right or left but
orient their world by the points of the compass, suggesting seeing things in relation to the world as a
whole rather than to ourselves. In a similar way, you might assume that a language with a paucity of
terms in comparison to other languages to refer to a thing or activity reflects a culture in which that
thing or activity is absent or not important. The Yanomamo of southern Venezuela are one of the few
societies in the world with a primitive technology. The Yanomamo language has only three numbers,
which correspond to “one,” “two,” and “more than two” in English. The development of technology
requires a language that can symbolize mathematics.

Compared to English, Japanese has a rich vocabulary of words to identify seasons of the year. The
four seasons are divided into 24 subseasons according to the traditional lunar calendar. And each
subseason is divided into the beginning, middle, and end.

Grammar and Syntax

 Global Voices
The scientist Will Steger is working to establish the impact of climate change on the indigenous people of the Arctic. Hunters
he has met on Baffin Island described to him newly arrived creatures in their environment that they have no words for in the
Inuktitut language—robins, finches, and dolphins.

Source: Duff-Brown (2007)

The second level of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is grammar and syntax. Whorf felt that grammar had
an even greater influence than vocabulary. For example, it has been observed that in the Eskimo
language, there is a consistent use of the word if rather than when in reference to the future. Think of
the difference between “When I graduate from college …” and “If I graduate from college .…” In this
example, when seems to indicate more certainty than if. Linguists have associated the more common
use of if in the Eskimo language with the harsh environment that Eskimos live in, where life is fragile
and there is little control over nature (Chance, 1966).
 Global Voices
It's said that when a Japanese writes a letter, it always begins with a remark on the weather and the season. It will say things
like “It is already mid-May, and the young foliage is fresh and green.”

English word order is typically subject-verb-object. English places emphasis on a doer, on an action
taker. Only about a third of English sentences lack a subject. In contrast, 75% of Japanese sentences
lack a subject. For example, you are more likely to hear, “I brought my textbook with me” in the
United States and hear “Brought book” in Japan. The subject is known by context. Similarly, if you
have hiked for a day into a deserted canyon, you might say to yourself, “I feel lonesome.” A Japanese
hiker would say only “Samishii,” identifying the experience without the need to identify the subject.
Yes, in English, we sometimes speak in abbreviated forms, but we're conscious of it being a
shortened version of a more detailed statement. The Japanese speaker is not abbreviating; Japanese
does not require the specification of a subject.
Criticisms of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
There are many legitimate criticisms of the extreme linguistic determinism form of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis (Fishman, 1972; Hoijer, 1954). One criticism has been Whorf's research methods. Whorf
may not have even met a member of the Hopi, and his translations of the language seem to emphasize
his conclusions when in fact subsequent research by Ekkehart Malotki (1983), a Northern Arizona
University professor of languages who standardized a writing system for the Hopi, documented many
references to time he had found in the Hopi language.

Linguist Steven Pinker presented a strong argument with the case of Idlefonso, an individual without a
language who was still numerate and intelligent. When taught sign language, Idlefonso was
completely able to communicate experiences and converse (Pinker, 1994). If language determines
thought, then Idlefonso would not have been able to think, but he clearly did.

Another criticism is that of translatability. If language determines thought, then at least some concepts
would be understandable only in the language in which they were first “thought.” Pinker argues that
just because it may take more words to translate a concept from one language to another, this is not
evidence that the concept cannot be understood by speakers of different languages.
Focus on Theory 5.2
Pinker's Criticisms of Sapir-Whorf
Canadian-born Harvard professor Steven Pinker (1994) published The Language Instinct in which he popularized Noam
Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind and added the controversial idea that language evolved by
Darwinian natural selection to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. Pinker is a major
critic of Sapir-Whorf:

People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: … the fundamentally different
Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of
reality are not “in” the world but are imposed by one's culture (and hence can be challenged, perhaps accounting for the
perennial appeal of the hypothesis to undergraduate sensibilities).

But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a
conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly
recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.

Source: Pinker (1994, p. 57).

Linguistic Relativism
Very few today accept the extreme position of the Sapir-Whorf linguistic determinism that our
thoughts and actions are determined by the language we speak; many more accept the view that
language only somehow shapes our thinking and behavior. In this interpretation, linguistic
characteristics and cultural norms influence each other. Steinfatt (1989), in an extensive review of the
literature, argues that the basis of linguistic relativism is that the difference between languages is not
what can be said but what is relatively easy to say.

There has been significant recent research to support the linguistic relativism position. One study
demonstrated a relationship between culture and grammar. Dunn, Greenhill, Levinson, and Gray
(2011) demonstrated cultural effects in language development. The research employed biological
tools to construct evolutionary trees for four language families and showed that each followed its own
idiosyncratic structural rules. This is evidence that even language rules are influenced by culture
rather than innate rules.

Another study that demonstrated the interrelationship between language and culture was reported by
Nisbett (2003). Remember the thesis that Westerners favor decontextualization and object emphasis
and that Easterners favor integration and relationships in perception. If linguistic relativism is valid,
then it should make a difference which language bilingual speakers are speaking. First, though,
bilingual speakers should be defined. Coordinate bilingual speakers are people who learn a second
language later in life and who typically use their second language in a limited number of contexts.
Compound bilingual speakers are people who learned a second language early in life and use the
language in many different contexts. For example, many people from China and Taiwan learn English
later in life, while people from Hong Kong and Singapore tend to learn English earlier and use it in
many different contexts.
 Global Voices
When you lose a culture, you're not losing a failed attempt at modernity. You're losing a unique set of answers to the question
of what it means to be human.

—Edmund Wade Davis, Light at the Edge of the World (quoted in Hayden, 2003, para. 5). Davis is a Canadian
anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and photographer whose work has focused on indigenous cultures, particularly in North and
South America.

Mainland and Taiwanese Chinese tested in their native language were twice as likely to group on the
basis of relationships, whether they were tested in their home country or in the United States. When
tested in English, they were much less likely to group on the basis of relationships. The conclusion is
that English served as a different way of representing the world than Chinese for this group.

While compound bilinguals from Hong Kong and Singapore grouped on the basis of relationships, the
preference was much weaker than for the coordinate Chinese and Taiwanese speakers. And it made
no difference for the compound speakers whether they were tested in Chinese or in English. The
researchers concluded that

there is an effect of culture on thought independent of language … because both the coordinate
Chinese speakers and the compound Chinese speakers group words differently from Americans
regardless of language of testing. The differences between coordinate and compound speakers
also indicate a culture difference independent of language. The compound speakers from
Westernized regions are shifted in a Western direction—and to the same extent regardless of
language of testing. (Nisbett, 2003, pp. 161–162)