sapir whorf language relativity
Why does it matter that language may be sexist, racist and so on? Apart from the obvious point that such language is offensive, many people that the language we hear and use has a big influence on the way we think.
There are two extreme views of this issue, the universalist and the relativist.
The universalist position is that all humans share common ways of thinking, a set of basic concepts about the world which we may call conceptual primes. One example is relative distance, the distinction between “near” and “far”. All languages, whatever their apparent differences, will provide means of expressing these essential concepts. According to this view, language simply reflects our thoughts. For example, racist terms exist because people have racist attitudes. The notion that language reflects thought is known as reflectionism.
The relativist position is the opposite of the universalist. We rely on language to form our ideas. Individual languages differ greatly in both lexis and grammar. It follows that the speakers of different languages will experience and understand the world in very different ways.
This position is mainly associated with two American linguists, Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as it is usually known, is that language actually determines thought. This theory is described as linguistic determinism.
Whorf studied the language of the native American Hopi people and observed that it was “timeless“. It lacked time adverbs and did not mark verbs for tense as we do in English. Hopi grammar was more concerned with distinguishing between what is objective and what is subjective. Whorf concluded that a Hopi speaker must view the world very differently from a native English speaker.
Other studies have focused on colour words. Some languages have more words than others for labelling colours. Many have around a dozen basic colour terms while others have as few as four. Different languages use colour
There are two extreme views of this issue, the universalist and the relativist.
The universalist position is that all humans share common ways of thinking, a set of basic concepts about the world which we may call conceptual primes. One example is relative distance, the distinction between “near” and “far”. All languages, whatever their apparent differences, will provide means of expressing these essential concepts. According to this view, language simply reflects our thoughts. For example, racist terms exist because people have racist attitudes. The notion that language reflects thought is known as reflectionism.
The relativist position is the opposite of the universalist. We rely on language to form our ideas. Individual languages differ greatly in both lexis and grammar. It follows that the speakers of different languages will experience and understand the world in very different ways.
This position is mainly associated with two American linguists, Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as it is usually known, is that language actually determines thought. This theory is described as linguistic determinism.
Whorf studied the language of the native American Hopi people and observed that it was “timeless“. It lacked time adverbs and did not mark verbs for tense as we do in English. Hopi grammar was more concerned with distinguishing between what is objective and what is subjective. Whorf concluded that a Hopi speaker must view the world very differently from a native English speaker.
Other studies have focused on colour words. Some languages have more words than others for labelling colours. Many have around a dozen basic colour terms while others have as few as four. Different languages use colour