The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (aka the "Principle of Linguistic Relativity")

Forthcoming, Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, Oxford: Blackwell.

Sean P. O'Neill

University of Oklahoma

Email: Sean.P.O-Neill-1@ou.edu

Abstract: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that language plays a powerful role in shap-

ing human consciousness, affecting everything from private thought and perception to

larger patterns of behavior in society—ultimately allowing members of any given speech

community to arrive at a shared sense of social reality. This entry starts with a brief con-

sideration of the philosophical insights that inspired the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the

"principle of linguistic relativity," as it is more often known today. Towards the end of

this piece, current empirical research is reviewed, which explores everything from human

universals to the cross-cultural differences in the construction of gender, color, space, and

other creative practices associated with language, such as storytelling, poetry, or song.

Main Text:

Philosophical Foundations

Though often associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who both wrote

extensively about language and perception early in the twentieth century, many other

writers throughout history have voiced similar ideas about the role of language in shaping

consciousness. Early in the history of Western thought, Aristotle (384-322BCE) observed

that political rhetoric has enormous power to influence the thinking of the masses, with

an impact that can be demonstrated in subsequent social action, such as the success or
failure of the orator in swaying an audience or in implementing an agenda. For Aristotle,

it was the poetry of everyday language, as exemplified by slogans (or modern-day sound

bites) that held a key to its ability linger in the mind, often appealing to emotion in a way

that overpowers reason.

Since the time of Aristotle, many philosophers have granted language a prime place in

their theories of human social cognition. In the late Renaissance, the Italian philosopher

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) proposed a theory of conceptual relativism, suggesting

that humans understand the world by building compelling though imperfect models,

which are accepted as a kind of virtual reality. Echoing Aristotle, Vico held it was the

poetic side of language, as reflected in everyday figures of speech, that had the power to

stimulate the imagination, allowing a given mythic or scientific model of reality to gain

social currency within a community.

While countless philosophers had commented on the influence of language on thought,

it was the German polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) who first advanced an

explicit theory of linguistic relativity in the mid-ninetieth century, based on his scholarly

knowledge of multiple world languages. Of particular interest to von Humboldt were

conceptual features showing refinement of thought (or perception) in a given area of ex-

perience, suggesting that different semantic or grammatical systems focused the speaker's

attention on specific features of the world, which may go unanalyzed, or even unnoticed

in another tongue. Far from seeing universals as a threat to his work on the diversity of

thought, he instead took these common threads as the starting point in his discussion of

the subtle differences among societies. In this way, the concept of linguistic relativity was

born alongside the quest for universal grammar, with the differences among languages
arising from its inherent creativity capacity, which leads to the development of new

words or grammatical features over time.

Franz Boas: Early Investigations in Language, Culture, and Perception

One of the first observers to witness the effects of language on perception firsthand was

the German-born scholar Franz Boas (1858-1942), who travelled to Baffin Island in

1883, where he immersed himself in the language and culture of the indigenous people

there, who are known as the Inuit today, though as Eskimos at the time. Though Boas set

out to study the appearance of seawater as a modest entry-point into the nature of percep-

tion, in grappling with the question of how the mind perceives an object through the lens

of socially constructed categories, Boas emerged as one of the founders of North Ameri-

can anthropology—eventually passing on this legacy to his most gifted student in linguis-

tics, Edward Sapir.

In the course of his stay among the Inuit, Boas began to examine the general way

in which communication rests on a common stock of shared concepts, bringing percep-

tion into alignment up to a point among the members of a community. As a general prin-

ciple, Boas noted that while one sensation may be subtly distinct from the next, people

tend to place these experiences into a finite set of preconceived categories when falling

back on regular linguistic habits, which can differ profoundly from one society to the

next. This insight echoes Plato's (428-348 BCE) observation that conceptual categories

are abstract in nature and may include perceptually dissimilar members (such as what

passes for a “dog” in English), though for Boas the emphasis was on the socially negoti-

ated nature of the categories. Thus, when it comes to sound patterning, speakers are pre-
disposed to hear the consonants or vowels of their own native tongue, and often experi-

ence great difficulty in accurately perceiving the sounds of other languages at first.

When it comes to labeling aspects of experience, Boas observed that one of the

primary functions of vocabulary is to condense perception into discrete categories, often

in ways that reflect local cultural interests. As he once put it:

Where it is necessary to distinguish a certain phenomenon in many aspects, which

in the life of the people play each an entirely independent role, many independent

words may develop, while in other cases modifications of a single term may suf-

fice. . . . Thus it happens that each language, from the point of view of another

language, may be arbitrary in its classifications (1911/1966, p. 22).

Based on his personal knowledge of Inuit, Boas famously remarked that there are several

separate words for snow depending on the situation, creating a regular distinction be-

tween snow "on the ground," "in the sky," and or "in a drift." Contrary to what has be-

come a matter of popular misconception, Boas never claimed that there were hundreds of

words for snow in Inuit—just that there was a different set of habitual categories than

found in other languages. The same principle applies to the argots of the professions,

where even in a single language such as English, speakers develop fine semantic distinc-

tions for matters of frequent conversation among insiders. In this sense, every academic

field develops a specialized lexicon for laying out habitual concepts, and much the same

is true of other languages.

Learning Inuit well enough to speak it gave Boas an opportunity to reflect on the

nature of grammar, where abstract concepts are often expressed in near shorthand form as

mere parts of words; consider English -s, meaning both “third person” and “present
tense.” What is obligatory in one language, when forming a grammatical construction,

may be optional in another—or absent altogether. More significantly, Boas noted that the

mental imagery shifts dramatically when passing from one language to the next, which is

an especially striking phenomenon when translating a highly agglutinative language like

Inuit, where a single word may contain up to dozen grammatical modifiers beyond the

root. Thus, he suggested that speakers of different language inhabit distinct (though paral-

lel) mental worlds. In this way, Boas prefigured fellow German scholar Martin Heidegger

(1889-1978), who claimed that we, as humans, live in a world that we ourselves fashion,

rather than simply existing within a natural environment—a feat that is accomplished

with language (as well as technology), in part importing a universe of conceptual catego-

ries onto our experience of life. As Boas and Heidegger came to insist, each in their own

way, human beings inhabit different mental worlds, imposing different meanings on the

same physical environment by virtue of participating in a particular language or culture.

Edward Sapir: Sound Patterning, Gestalt Psychology, and Poetic Vision

When Franz Boas first encountered Edward Sapir (1884-1939) as a student in one of his

anthropology classes at Columbia University, the young Sapir was already exceptionally

well prepared to follow in his future mentor's footsteps. Steeped in multiple languages

from early childhood—including Yiddish, German, English, and Hebrew—Sapir had a

natural ear for discerning the many fine nuances of sound and meaning in human speech,

and went on to learn dozens of additional languages in the course of his career. In Sapir's

hands, the questions Boas had raised about the influence of language on cognition quick-

ly gave rise to a series empirical investigations on comparative grounds.

 Following the path that Boas carved out, Sapir went on to conduct intensive lin-

guistic fieldwork in multiple indigenous languages, primarily in North America, which he

meticulously documented at every level of structure, from sound patterning and grammar

to vocabulary and storytelling. Today, these careful studies in the structures of world lan-

guages are as valuable to linguistic science as they are to the communities where he con-

ducted his research, where Sapir's materials continue to play an active role in revitalizing

the languages and associated cultures, including religious narrative, folklore, song, and

traditional worldview. In the course of his career, Sapir also conducted original research

on African and Asian languages, as well as the majority of the European tongues.

In the process of transcribing languages that had no previous tradition of writing,

Sapir observed that even fluent speakers are rarely aware of the finer nuances of sound in

their native tongue, instead paying much closer attention to how these sounds create regu-

lar shifts in meaning. Take the sounds l and r in English, which create a regular contrast

between the words fall and far, even though many languages (such as Japanese) make no

regular distinction between these relatively similar sounds. Thus, rather than noticing

every possible nuance in the flow of speech, speakers group clusters of related sounds

into larger categories on an intuitive basis, perceiving a similarity among sounds that are

in fact objectively distinct. In this way, English speakers rarely notice that the letter l ac-

tually represents several distinct sounds, as can be heard by carefully listening to words

like lull (with a darker variety at the end) or clean (with a whispery variation). Ultimate-

ly, as Sapir pointed out, membership in a speech community necessarily brings percep-

tion into alignment on the plane of sound, since any given language deploys its own

unique set of sound categories, creating regular shifts in meaning on the basis of these
mere sounds (as seen with far and fall above). In time, these functional units of sound

came to be known as phonemes, and the phonemic principle was later widely accepted in

linguistics, based on the general process of categorical perception, which leads people to

place objectively distinct phenomena into similar categories for social purposes—almost

automatically after a time, as a matter of habit.

Though initially rooted in sound perception, the underlying principle Sapir identi-

fied was a profound one, applying to most areas of human life, where a similar alignment

of perception potentially emerges among those engaged in a social encounter. Ultimately,

Sapir compared the basic process of pattern recognition in language to work in Gestalt

psychology, where it was shown that people regularly project subjective patterns onto ob-

jective reality. Much as people spontaneously project an internal image onto the random

patterns of Rorschach ink blocks (or the stars in the sky), all fluent speakers arrive at a

shared sense of meaning when listening to the mere physical sounds of speech, with simi-

lar mental imagery and storylines passing through their heads, only when one has a cul-

tural key to the semantics. Without such a key to the inner psychological meaning of

speech (as when listening to a foreign tongue), language is reduced to the physical plane

of sound, much like a random ink block without an associated mental image projected

onto it. Given that no two languages are ever exactly identical (or even closely parallel)

in sound or meaning, Sapir suggested that speakers of different languages ultimately in-

habit different mental worlds, even in relation to the same features of objective reality.

Based on his extensive documentation of native botanical knowledge, Sapir noted that the

plants we so often dismiss as weeds in English frequently have far more dignified names
in other languages, leading speakers to dwell on them more in everyday life—often in

association with information about their medicinal properties. As Sapir once put it:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of

social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the par-

ticular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It

is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use

of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific

problems of communication or reflection (Sapir 1929/1949, p. 162).

Given language is imbued with inherited perspectives, passed down over the ages, such

as the traditional knowledge associated with medicinal plants, Sapir compared languages

to geometrical frames of reference, with each particular system of sound and meaning

arriving at one viable framework, among many, through which to see the world. Echoing

Boas, Sapir also insisted that grammar plays a powerful role in guiding perception, given

that every utterance in a given language must adhere to its regular grammatical rules,

thereby introducing obligatory or habitual conceptual elements. Thus, some languages

have specialized verb endings for placing an event in the ancient past or distant future—

an option that is unavailable in English, but an important part of storytelling in languages

like Karuk in northern California. Ultimately, the frames of reference that we project onto

the world are rooted in a shared cultural background, which reaches its highpoint in the

realm of poetry (or song), where the author composes a compelling, new vision of the

world, even while drawing heavily on the traditional sounds and meanings of a given

tongue. In addressing this creative side of language, where the speaker has the power to

overcome the audience with a stream of words, Sapir himself once remarked:
 The understanding of a poem, for instance, involves not merely an understanding

of the single words in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the

whole life of the community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by

their overtones. Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much

more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose. (Sa-

pir 1929/1949, p. 162)

Thus, when listening to someone speaking, our perceptions about the world are routinely

shaped by those around us, as we attend to the meanings of their words, sharing in their

thoughts and feelings in an empathetic fashion. Moving from the ordinary to the revolu-

tionary, a gifted poet or songwriter can shock an audience with a compelling new vision

of life, even while working within the preexisting sounds patterns or meanings of a given

tongue. As we know today, language depends on the neurological process of mirroring,

whereby one begins to see the world from the perspective of another person while engag-

ing in social interaction (Christiansen & Kirby, 2003).

Benjamin Lee Whorf: The Linguistic Relativity Principle

In the hands of Sapir's most famous student, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), this an-

cient thesis about the place of language in guiding perception came to be known as the

principle of linguistic relativity. In this setting, it is worth noting that many of Whorf's

intellectual contemporaries also shared this interest in language and thought, including

none other than Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who

took for granted the idea that language played a central role in the play of perspective that

unfolds in human social life. In a curious twist of history, Einstein's famous theory of rel-
ativity was partly inspired by the earlier Humboldtian theory of language, where it was

also argued that same world may be seen from multiple valid perspectives, depending on

the frame of reference of the observer (see Leavitt 2011). As Whorf (1956) once phrased

the thesis, in particularly strong and memorable terms:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories

and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there be-

cause they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented

in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—

and this means largely by the linguistic systems in 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.

This agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE AB-

SOLUTELY OBLIGATORY; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organi-

zation and classification of data which the agreement decrees. (pp. 213–214)

Like Boas, Whorf came to linguistics from a background in the hard sciences, chemical

engineering in his case, where he learned to pay close attention to minute influences on

any given event, as it arises from the interaction of the various elements present, each

with their own potentialities in the chain of interaction. This training served him well in

his profession as fire insurance inspector, giving him a depth of insight into the chemical

basis of a given fire. When his attention turned to linguistics, under the tutelage of Sapir

at Yale University, Whorf came to see language as an additional key to understanding the

chain of events that resulted in the accident. Given that human element in the fires, he
came to see the mistaken social reality of the workplace as a contributing factor as well,

especially as something that could be examined in speech. Thus, what workers routinely

called "empty drums," were in fact filled with dangerous but invisible gasses, easily

bursting into flames near the slightest spark. Yet the language of the workplace ("empty

drum") was misleading and in fact masked the true nature of the phenomenon. In another

case, what workers described as "scrap lead" was in fact laden with wax and highly

flammable, leading to a lack of caution around the substance and another accident erupt-

ed. In this way, Whorf came to argue that language is a potent ingredient in any chain of

human interaction, affecting subsequent behavior as much as it shapes our underlying

thoughts and perceptions. By casting light on the power of labels, Whorf was diagnosing

a disease in language, as a frequent cause of misunderstanding; of course, introducing

more accurate language is one way to break this chain, but either way language is a pow-

erful force in shaping consciousness. On the other hand, George Orwell (1903-1950) not-

ed that the power of language can also be deftly used to political ends, with an intent to

deceive in the name of a given cause; thus, grave atrocities, like bombing innocent by-

standers in the villages of an enemy, can be glossed over with implicit rationales, such

suggested by expressions like "pacification" or "the elimination of undesirable elements"

(Orwell, 1950). In this way, public outcry can be suppressed, given that the brutality had

been masked. In a more innocuous way, appealing product names often provide a reason

for buying one brand name over another, changing the way the shopper "sees" or re-

sponds to a given option, even where the underlying product is the same.

Having shown that language plays a powerful role in guiding perception even in

the ordinary language of the workplace, Whorf went on to argue that each language leads
the speaker to a particular set of observations about the world, especially in relation to the

habitual concepts that are applied to experience in everyday grammar and vocabulary.

Based on his comparative analyses of Hopi and English, Whorf came to argue that even

time-perception is powerfully conditioned by language, especially in tandem with associ-

ated cultural models of time. English speakers, he argued, had accepted a linear view of

time, following perhaps the cosmology of the Bible, which begins with Creation and ends

with the Second Coming—which is parallel to the worldview of the science of his day, in

the sense that there is a definite beginning and end. This linear worldview, he argued, was

reflected in our everyday language, where time is counted in discrete units that continue

to accumulate, such as the days, weeks, or months of the year—as well as the years them-

selves, which can be counted back to the time of Christ or a specific date of creation it-

self, such as seventeenth century Bishop Ussher’s oft-cited date of 4,004 BC. Thus, Eng-

lish speakers count these units of times as if they accumulate, with the familiar binomial

expressions that start with cardinal numbers followed by discrete units, such as three days

or six years of time. In Hopi, on the other hand, Whorf observed that time is analyzed as

a cyclical process, with an explicit focus on the return of the events that mark the passage

time, such as the rising of the sun or the phases of the moon. Thus, he observed that Hopi

speakers talk about time with expressions that focus on cyclical processes—such as the

return of the sun and the moon at regular intervals. In Hopi, he noted, these cyclical pro-

cesses are counted using ordinal numbers, which can be translated with expressions like

"on the third day" (rather than "three days") or "on the fifth winter" (rather than "five

years"), where the explicit focus on the return of regular cycle, not more abstract linear

progression. In this way, Whorf argued that even time-perception can be powerfully con-
ditioned by language, even when the speaker is not completely aware of the overall im-

plications presupposed (and widely accepted) in ordinary speech.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Neo-Whorfianism

Though originally rooted in observations made by philosophers—and later supported by

direct experience in multiple languages—the principle of linguistic relativity was eventu-

ally reframed as a testable scientific hypothesis in the 1950s, under the new assumption

that it could only be evaluated under controlled laboratory conditions. By the mid-20th

century, the original architects of this school of thought had all passed away, leaving only

Harry Hoijer (1904-1976), one of Sapir's early students, to represent of this long line of

research on language, thought, and perception. It was Hoijer (1954) himself who first in-

troduced the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" as an expression, greatly simplifying the social

complexities of the problem by reducing it to two primary dimensions—namely, cogni-

tion, on the one hand, which could be considered as a dependent variable, and language,

on the other, especially in the form of the obligatory grammatical categories. Ironically,

the additional variables of worldview and social interaction were often factored out with-

in this emerging scientific framework, offering only a pale shadow of the ideas originally

espoused by Boas, Sapir, and Whorf themselves. In many ways, the "Sapir-Whorf hy-

pothesis" is a misnomer, given that the two figures never actually collaborated on any

publications, while neither author ever proposed anything resembling scientific hypothe-

sis, instead preferring the phraseology of philosophical principles and a method of intro-

spection based on experience with speakers of multiple languages. In the popular imagi-

nation, the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has sometimes been reduced to an extreme

and untenable caricature known as linguistic determinism, based on the presumption that
language either limits or overpowers consciousness, rather than existing as a mere ingre-

dient in a chain of social interactions.

Almost as soon as the principle of linguistic relativity was repackaged as a testa-

ble hypothesis, psychologists and anthropologists around the planet were stimulated to

initiate a series of empirical studies aimed at measuring the impact of language on per-

ception under controlled conditions. Illustrating a key Whorfian point, the power of the

linguistic label—here the very concept of the "hypothesis"—fundamentally changed the

way an entire generation of researchers viewed the problem, with tangible effects on their

subsequent behavior in terms of developing research programs to evaluate the idea. To-

day any test proving this point is said to demonstrate a Whorfian effect—or the measura-

ble influence of language on a given area of human action, thought, or perception.

Over the years, empirical studies have repeatedly uncovered Whorfian effects

(both strong and weak) in many areas of human experience—surprisingly, even when

social interaction is largely factored out of the equation. Many early studies took color as

a tangible starting point, literally evaluating how speakers "see" the world when filtering

their perceptions through specific categories for colors in the world's many languages.

Rodger Brown and Eric Lenneberg (1954), for instance, found that there was a strong re-

lationship between codability and availability—or the ability to remember a given color

in cases where the subject has regular linguistic a label for it; they also suggested the ef-

fect was strongest among monolinguals, who had no other categories for coding the per-

ceptions. Moving to the ancient question of linguistic structure, Lucy (1992) has shown

that obligatory grammatical categories, such as plural markers, powerfully condition how

speakers attend to the perceptual elements in a given scene; thus, subjects were more
likely to recall the number objects in a picture when their grammatical systems required

them to pay attention to these features—as regular matters of verbal and perceptual habit.

In a similar way, Stephen Levinson (1992) has shown that speakers project a language-

specific spatial map onto their experiences of the world, with implications that extend far

beyond the realm of verbal communication. In some languages, such as Guugu Yimidhirr

of northeastern Australia, speakers must pervasively attend to a geocentric spatial grid

with operates in terms of cardinal directions, like north, south, east, and west; on the oth-

er hand, egocentric spatial concepts have little place in this language. As a consequence,

Guugu Yimidhirr speakers outperform speakers of many other languages when it comes

to remembering the exact orientation of objects in laboratory settings—or even when ges-

turing toward features of the landscape while telling stories. Turning to the social con-

struction of gender, Borodistsky, Schmidt, and Phillips (2003) have shown that speakers

often project masculine and feminine traits onto inanimate objects, in accordance with the

grammatical systems of their languages. In languages like Spanish, where a key is con-

sidered feminine for grammatical purposes, she showed that speakers were likely to de-

scribe along those lines, with adjectives corresponding to golden, intricate, little, lovely,

shiny, and tiny. Yet very different traits are projected in other language, such as German,

where the key is considered masculine, with speakers attributing traits such as hard,

heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful to the same object.

Another strain of neo-Whorfian thought has returned to the social foundations of

the linguistic relativity principle, exploring the influence of language on consciousness

during the actual flow of social interaction. In the same article where Hoijer (1954) first

advanced his scientific model of linguistic relativity, he also proposed an alternative hu-
manistic plan of study focusing on the influence of language across cultures. Far outside

the laboratory setting, he called for a program of research aimed at uncovering the impli-

cations for thinking in multilingual culture-areas such as the Southwest, where the varia-

ble of culture could be held relativity constant, even language itself shifts quite dramati-

cally from one community to the next, as among Navajos and Hopis. In another sense,

Dell Hymes (1966) suggested that the principle of linguistic relativity is itself secondary

to the relativity of social practices across languages, restoring attention to what Boas, Sa-

pir, and Whorf considered the heart of language: the creative traditions surrounding sto-

rytelling, song, poetry, or even the language of the workplace. In terms of practice, Mi-

chael Silverstein has demonstrated that language use is often profoundly influenced by

deep-seated ideological values, which powerfully condition interactions and even guide

the direction of linguistic change. In investigating the loss of thee and thou in English,

Silverstein (1985) showed that this shift in the pronominal system emerged first as a pro-

test to the sense of social hierarchy among Quakers, who insisted on addressing everyone

as equals with thee and thou, in an effort to instill an sense of equality before God. Over a

relatively short period, these second-person pronouns took on strong religious overtones,

leading most English speakers to turn away from these now-archaic sounding forms,

which are still ideologically charged in religious terms to this day. On similar ideological

grounds, Sean O'Neill has shown that speakers of widely different languages sometimes

insist on maintaining their semantic and structural differences, only increasing the degree

of linguistic diversity over time, as he observed (O'Neill 2008) among indigenous com-

munities of northwestern California, where speakers of the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk have

placed a premium on maintaining social distinction on linguistic grounds. Despite intense

social contact over many centuries, including widespread multilingualism, the indigenous

peoples of this region have fiercely maintained their linguistic boundaries, both in terms

of grammatical features as well as social practices, such as storytelling, poetics, and song.

SEE ALSO: contextà corpus analysisà discourse analysisà emotion and affectà

frame(ing) à ethnography of communicationà interactional sociolinguisticsà ideol-

ogy in discourseà intercultural dialogueà language socializationà narrative analysis

à sexist discourse

References and Suggested Readings

Boas, F. (1966). Introduction to handbook of American Indian languages. P. Holder

(Ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1911.)

Borodiskty, L., Schmidt, A. & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax and semantics. In D.

Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of lan-

guage and thought (pp. 61-78). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brown, R., & E. Lenneberg. (1954). A study in language and cognition. Journal of Ab-

normal and Social Psychology, 49(3), 454-462.

Christiansen, M. & Kirby, S. (Eds.). (2003). Language evolution. New York, NY: Oxford

University Press.

Hoijer, H. (1954). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In H. Hoijer (Ed.), Language in culture:

Proceedings of a conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of cul-

ture. Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 79 (pp. 92–105). Compara-

tive Studies of Cultures and Civilizations, No. 3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press.

Hymes, D. (1966). Two types of linguistic relativity (with examples from amerindian

ethnography). In W. Bright (Ed.), Sociolinguistics, proceedings of the UCLA sociolin-

guistics conference, 1964 (pp. 114–157). The Hague: Mouton.

Leavitt, J. (2011). Linguistic relativities: Language diversity in modern thought. Cam-

bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, S. (1992). Language and cognition: Cognitive consequences of spatial descrip-

tion in Guugu Yimidhirr. Working Paper 13. Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Cognitive An-

thropology Research Group, Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Lucy, J. (1992). Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study in the linguistic

relativity hypothesis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

O’Neill, S. (2008). Cultural contact and linguistic relativity among the Indians of North-

western California. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press

Orwell, G. (1950). Politics and the English language. In G. Orwell (Ed.), Shooting the

elephant and other essays (pp. 75–92). New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace.

Sapir, E. (1949). Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Silverstein, M. (1985). Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of struc-

ture, usage, and ideology. In E. Mertz & R. Parmentier (Eds.), Semiotic meditation (pp.

220–259). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee

Whorf. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.