Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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Language is so fundamental to our everyday experience—external and internal—that it can be jarring to remember that not everyone shares the same linguistic experience.

Yes, we might know that different people speak different languages, but considering that those different languages might distort our thinking in different ways doesn’t necessarily follow. Surely, we might think, languages provide us with roughly the same information in roughly the same way, so that it’s mostly a distinction of operating system: choosing a brain-based version of MacOS or Windows?

Maybe. Interestingly, it’s not clear to what degree language influences one’s perception of the world, if it does so at all.

Further, for a long while social scientists felt fairly certain that perception was definitively altered by the words we use to describe the world, only to later discover that much of the evidence to support that assertion was flawed, and that what had become common knowledge was perhaps more of a prejudiced fallacy.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a term that’s come to be associated with this concept, though the label’s namesakes—Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf—never actually worked together or refined their respective ideas into a hypothesis.

What they did do was refine ideas that had been initially posited (formally, in writing) by a philosopher and linguist named Wilhelm von Humboldt in the early 19th Century; a man who ruminated that language might be somehow expressive of the values and spirit of a nation and a people—a concept he developed while codifying language as a concept, describing it as a system that “makes infinite use of finite means.” He determined, in other words, that with a limited dictionary and limited grammatical rules, you could create unlimited meaning; which is true.

Humboldt’s analysis deviated from the concrete at that point, however, as he later claimed that the systems established to govern a given language were indicative of the quality and character of a people: a concept that was later spun-off by a variety of ethnographers and anthropologists with at times quite problematic results (of the kind you often found in the early 19th century when European scholars attempted, with incomplete knowledge, to organize the world, almost always with themselves and their own culture at the top of the civilizational pyramid).

Sapir and Whorf expanded on Humboldt’s ideas a century later, though they were of different generations: Sapir initially serving as one of Whorf’s professors at Yale, teaching a course called “American Indian Linguistics.” Whorf was an autodidact, though, who only really attended class to get in with Sapir and build rapport.

The two reportedly influenced each other’s thinking on the relationship between language and psychology, and though both were heavily influenced by Native (North and South) American languages, their thinking deviated somewhat in terms of the connections between linguistics and human behavior.

For his part, Sapir focused more on the role of language in how relationships between individuals form, and thus, how societies develop over time: what shape they take, and how they evolve.

Whorf spent more of his time assessing language patterns and attempting to match them with similar patterns found within the framework of cultures—trying to see if particular linguistic rules or properties correlated with rules or properties of how a society is set up.

Both men are perhaps best known for this aspect of their work, but it’s important to note that, first, neither one of them was absolutely certain about these ideas, and second, neither one of them attempted to formalize them into a hypothesis.

Most of Whorf’s writings on the matter were only published posthumously, and the notion that his writings congealed into a hypothesis stemmed from a friend who was designated a curator of the late-linguist’s works. He published an article entitled “The Systemization of the Whorf Hypothesis,” and another friend and curator coined the term Sapir-Whorf hypothesis when discussing the same work at a conference in 1954.

In the years since, many variations of this concept have emerged, including two umbrella categories that most subsequent ideas fall into that are broadly defined as Weak and Strong arguments for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

In the Strong camp, we find arguments that consider language and culture to be inextricably tied, one informing the other in radical ways, and substantial chunks of what make us who we are determined, at least in part, by the words we use to describe what we see: the terms we use for our loved ones and enemies, the verbs we use to describe different activities, and so on.

In the Weak camp, we find arguments that language and culture, by their very definition, evolved alongside one another, and as such, there’s a good chance we can learn something about one by looking at the other.

To be clear, we don’t know what connections exist between language and culture, if any indeed exist.

There is modern, hard evidence-based support for the idea that people from different cultures will remember some types of data differently from those in others, on average, and that different languages focus on different sorts of information. English, for instance, tends to encode the manner of motion into verbs, while other languages often encode the direction of movement, instead.

On the other hand, there’s no firm evidence that the differences found in these languages will definitively change the way a native speaker thinks or behaves. Perhaps they’ll utilize language somewhat differently than their neighbor who speaks some other tongue, but that doesn’t imply that they’ll see the world differently, or have their behaviors altered at all by the theoretical language lens embedded in their brain.

There does seem to be evidence for a distinction in behavior between cultures that tend to use geocentric terminology versus those who use self-centered spatial orientation-based verbiage to give directions and establish a sense of place (saying things like “North” or “West” versus saying things like “Across the river” or “Behind the bakery”).

There’s also evidence that cultures lacking vocabulary-based distinctions between some colors will not perceive as many tiny differences within the portion of the color wheel for which they lack the proper verbiage to navigate with specificity.

Previous generations of Japanese-speakers, for instance, used the word “ao” to refer to blue, which in their eye included what English-speakers would call “green.” So green to them was just another shade of blue, and thus, distinctions made between these colors were less clear and perhaps less important-seeming than would have been the case for English-speakers.

That said, modern Japanese has a word for green (“midori”), just as the language now has words for orange (“orenji”) and purple (“pūpuru”). After WWII, these distinctions became more important because of the increased interactions between the Japanese people and the Western world, where separate words were used for these colors. But up until that point, these colors had been considered, and referred to as different shades of yellow or red.

Importantly, neither color model—the one used by the Japanese or the one used by the Western world—was inherently right or wrong: they were just internally categorized differently, in terms of color theory and in terms of the language used to identify them.

That said, Japanese has long had color distinctions that are lacking in common English; this history of color delineations being found in one language and lacking in another goes both ways.

“Momo-iro,” “akabeni,” “sango-iro,” and “sakuranezumi” are all different red, red-violet, and red-yellow colors—what we today might call peach, pure crimson, coral, and cherry blossom; though the English language only relatively recently began to add colors from this portion of the color wheel to its dictionary, and most of these are pseudo-definitions invented by paint companies and other such entities, not by linguists.

Although it may be more satisfying and concise to have specific, individual words for niche concepts, it’s not accurate to say that you cannot refer to such concepts lacking those independent designations. English only gained the word “schadenfreude” by appropriating the German word, for instance, but we could always say “I feel a type of pleasure as a result of someone else’s misfortune,” and still arrive at a similar linguistic destination.

It seems likely that, as with everything, there are a lot of potential connections between language and culture that warrant further explanation and exploration. But it also seems likely that deciding that distinctions between groups are a consequence of their language is a claim that will often be proven wrong or incomplete, and that very often the distinctions will actually be two ways of doing things: both developed for similar reasons, or in response to the same variables, but which aren’t otherwise correlated.

You might have fifty words for snow if you live in a place where there are many types of snow that you need to be able to quickly identify and communicate to other people, for instance, but that doesn’t imply that you pay close attention to snow because you have fifty words for it. You pay attention to snow, and have a lot of words for snow, because snow is important to your survival and fundamental to your environment.

There are many fascinating components of language structure that warrant further investigation, and there’s a good chance that some of the connections between things like behavior and relationships and perception are, in fact, tied to the way we say things: the way we perceive the world through the lens of language.

We may also realize that some languages have more heavily influenced the cultures alongside which they developed, and in turn, we can look more closely at certain aspects of all other cultures, searching for more subtle versions of what we can suddenly see quite clearly in those extreme, caricature-like examples.

But based on what we know now, the assumption that language will invariably shape the way a person sees the world would seem to be based on outdated suppositions that are tempting to believe, but for which we don’t have any concrete rationale beyond individual case-studies, cultural bias, and the belief that it would be really neat if it were true.

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