Introduction
The term and the notion of ‘linguistic relativity’ are usually associated with the names of the American linguist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who developed the ideas of Sapir’s teacher Franz Boas (1858–1942), one of the founders of North American anthropology and linguistics. For these scholars, the diversity of languages was one of the central facts about human beings and potentially, at least, had implications for con- ceptualization of natural and social situations. In the 1920s and 1930s Sapir and Whorf both proposed a ‘principle of linguistic relativity’ with an explicit reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity: this amounted to maintaining that differences between the languages of speaker and analyst constituted a factor that had to be taken explicitly into account in any analysis of social and cultural life– just as in Einstein’s relativity the velocity and direction of the measurer him- or herself had tofigure in the determination of those of any other entity. In neither case was there a privileged fixed point or centre from which everything else could be judged.
For Boas and his students, each language constituted a system organized at several levels, each of which had its own kind of coherence. For each language, the level of sounds, of phonology, was evidently structured and obviously different from the sound organization of other languages: this is what produced the phenomenon of accent. With the level of lexicon one arrived at units of meaning, which divided the world in unique ways for each language and for its speakers, largely correlated with the speakers’ way of life – if the way of life changed, then lexicon was likely to change along with it. It was at the‘higher’ level of grammatical categories – e.g., tense, gender, number in Western languages, data source or shape in some others– that one found organizations of meaning and orientations towards some aspects of experience rather than others, organizations and orientations that were pervasive and relatively inaccessible to conscious manipulation. A speaker of English must, through the use of tense, specify the relationship between the time of the event spoken about and the time of speaking, and must do so hundreds of times every day; a speaker of Aymara need only specify this relationship when it is pertinent to do so, but must specify how she knows what she’s talking about, again (at least) hundreds of times every day. Without claiming that language determines culture or thought, the linguistic relativity principle says that such differences are real, are potentially important, and deserve to be attended to.
This kind of a principle faces immediate opposition from one well-established school of thought, and risks being identified with another. Since Aristotle, the view has been widespread in the West that all humans think in the same way, and that language merely serves to code and communicate already-formed thoughts. Such a view is basic to such philosophical monuments as Cartesian rationalism, Locke’s empiricism, and Kant’s transcendentalism; and this kind of universalism is carried on today by the dominant mode of cognitive science. If the basis of a whole discipline is that the speaker of any language is merely translating from a universal ‘mentalese’ (see, for instance, Pinker, 1994), then any claims of the importance of the specifics of a given language are highly troublesome.
The strategy most commonly used to overcome or avoid this issue has been to identify linguistic relativity with the other great Western view of the relationship among language, thought, and culture, which identifies these as aspects of a single national or ethnic whole, varying from people to people. This kind of view goes back to the Romantics in the early nineteenth century and remains powerful in nationalist and ethnic affirmation movements today. It holds that every language is a natural part of a unique national or cultural totality; in other words, that the human world is made up of a number of national or ethnic essences. The language one speaks, in this view, reflects – or indeed determines – one’s mode of thought, in a way that is distinct for each nation. In some of these models, one’s language in fact limits what it is possible to think.
The difference between such essentialism and the much more open principle of linguistic relativity should be clear. But for decades the two have been identified, especially by schools of thought that seek or assume a single universal human mode of thinking or knowing the world. This convenient straw man can be disposed of even more easily if, unlike Boas and company, we eliminate some aspects of language– sounds, which obviously differ from language to language in ways of which speakers are only partly conscious; or grammatical structures, which oblige speakers to attend to certain aspects of reality whether these are relevant or not– leaving only isolated words to represent‘language’.
The whole combination– the claim that the words your language gives you determine and limit what it is possible for you to think– while evidently false (or because it is evidently false) has come to be the most common definition given of ‘linguistic relativity’, even by authors who are striving to be fair and balanced. In the succinct formulation of John I. Saeed in his textbook on Semantics (second edition, 2003: 40, third edition, 2009: 41), linguistic relativity is the view that‘lexicalized concepts impose restrictions on possible ways of thinking’. In fact, as is clear in the definition given above, none of the actual proponents of linguistic relativity made any such claim (on page 43 of his book (third edn.), Saeed himself notes the importance of grammatical categories, as opposed to words, for Whorf); on the contrary, no language, they insisted, puts limits on what it is possible to conceptualize– while they continued to demonstrate a seductive power of established language patterns to offer easy-to-follow mental paths. This becomes par- ticularly clear in Whorf’s distinction between least-effort ‘habitual thinking’, largely guided by a received language and culture, and what it is possible for a person to conceive, in particular by becoming familiar with languages and cultures very different from his or her own.
Here I will lay out some of the elements of linguistic relativity as presented by the Boasians. To understand why Boas came to his formulation of this theory, this presentation will be preceded by a brief history of major Western approaches to language diversity before Boas, laying out the sources of both universalist and pluralist options. After the discussion of Boasian linguistic relativity I will give brief presentations of an alternative pluralist option contemporary with his, that of the ‘neo-Humboldtian’ school of linguistics in Germany; and I will follow this with a discussion of developments since the deaths of the idea’s original proponents: the virtual
suppression of serious consideration of language diversity in the decades of the rise and hegemony of cognitive psychology and Chomskyan linguistics, and the recent rise of interest in linguistic relativity in a number offields.