The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

From George Orwell's 1984 (1948):

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to
make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had
been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a
thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least
as far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give
exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could
properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of
arriving at them by indirect method. This was done partly by the invention of new words
and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible
of all secondary meanings whatever...A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole
language would no more know that ‘equal' had once had the secondary meaning of
"politically equal," or that ‘free' had once meant "intellectually free," than, for instance, a
person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings
attaching to ‘queen' or ‘rook.' There would be many crimes and errors which it would be
beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore
unimaginable."

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theorizes that thoughts and behavior are determined (or are
at least partially influenced) by language. If true in its strongest sense, the sinister
possibility of a culture controlled by Newspeak or some other language is not just science
fiction. Since its inception in the 1920s and 1930s, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has
caused controversy and spawned research in a variety of disciplines including linguistics,
psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and education. To this day it has not been
completely disputed or defended, but has continued to intrigue researchers around the
world.

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf brought attention to the relationship between
language, thought, and culture. Neither of them formally wrote the hypothesis nor
supported it with empirical evidence, but through a thorough study of their writings about
linguistics, researchers have found two main ideas. First, a theory of linguistic
determinism that states that the language you speak determines the way that you will
interpret the world around you. Second, a weaker theory of linguistic relativism that
states that language merely influences your thoughts about the real world.

Edward Sapir studied the research of Wilhelm von Humboldt. About one hundred years
before Sapir published his linguistic theories, Humboldt wrote in Gesammelte Werke a
strong version of linguistic determinism: "Man lives in the world about him principally,
indeed exclusively, as language presents it to him." Sapir took this idea and expanded on
it. Although he did not always support this firm hypothesis, his writings state that there is
clearly a connection between language and thought.
From "The Status of Linguistics as a Science" (1929)
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 particular
language which has become the medium of expression in 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: The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world' is to a large
extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are
ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The
worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world
with different labels attached...Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very
much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose...We
see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits
of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

As the underlined portions show, Sapir used firm language to describe this connection
between language and thought. To Sapir, the individual is unconscious to this connection
and subject to it without choice.

Benjamin Lee Whorf was Sapir's student. Whorf devised the weaker theory of linguistic
relativity: "We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all
observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe..."
(1940/1956). He also supported, at times, the stronger linguistic determinism. To Whorf,
this connection between language and thought was also an obligation not a choice.

From "Science and Linguistics" (1940/1956):

"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 because 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. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one,
but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the
organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees."

Both Sapir and Whorf agreed that it is our culture that determines our language, which in
turn determines the way that we categorize our thoughts about the world and our
experiences in it.

For more than fifty years researchers have tried to design studies that will support or
refute this hypothesis. Support for the strong version has been weak because it is virtually
impossible to test one's world view without using language. Support for the weaker
version has been minimal. Yet this hypothesis continues to fascinate researchers.
Problems with the hypothesis begin when one tries to discern exactly what the hypothesis
is stating. Penn notes that the hypothesis is stated "more and less strongly in different
places in Sapir's and Whorf's writings" (1972:13). At some points, Sapir and Whorf
appear to support the strong version of the hypothesis and at others they only support the
weak version. Alford (1980) also notes that neither Sapir nor Whorf actually named any
of their ideas about language and cognition the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This name only
appeared after their deaths. This has lead to a wide interpretation of what researchers
consider to be the one and only hypothesis.

Another problem with the hypothesis is that it requires a measurement of human thought.
Measuring thought and one's world view is nearly impossible without the confounding
influence of language, another of the variables being studied. Researchers settle for the
study of behavior as a direct link to thought.

If one is to believe the strong version of linguistic determinism, one also has to agree that
thought is not possible without language. What about the pre-linguistic thought of
babies? How can babies acquire language without thought? Also, where did language
come from? In the linguistic determinist's view, language would have to be derived from
a source outside the human realm because thought is impossible without language and
before language there would have been no thought.

Supporters of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis must acknowledge that their study of language
in the "real world" is not without doubt if their language influences how they categorize
what they seem to experience. Penn writes, "In short, if one believes in linguistic
relativity, one finds oneself in the egocentric quandary, unable to make assertions about
reality because of doubting one's own ability to correctly describe reality" (1972:33).

Yet another problem with the hypothesis is that languages and linguistic concepts are
highly translatable. Under linguistic determinism, a concept in one language would not be
understood in a different language because the speakers and their world views are bound
by different sets of rules. Languages are in fact translatable and only in select cases of
poetry, humor and other creative communications are ideas "lost in the translation."

One final problem researchers have found with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is Whorf's
lack of empirical support for his linguistic insights. Whorf uses language nuances to
prove vast differences between languages and then expects his reader to infer those
differences in thought and behavior. Schlesinger attacks Whorf's flimsy thesis support:
"...the mere existence of such linguistic diversities is insufficient evidence for the
parallelist claims of a correspondence between language on the one hand and cognition
and culture, on the other, and for the determinist claim of the latter being determined by
the former" (1991:18). Schlesinger also fails to see the connection between Whorf's
linguistic evidence and any cultural or cognitive data. "Whorf occasionally supplies the
translations from a foreign language into English, and leaves it to the good faith of the
reader to accept the conclusion that here must have been a corresponding cognitive or
cultural phenomenon" (1991:27).
One infamous example Whorf used to support his theory was the number of words the
Inuit people have for ‘snow.' He claimed that because snow is a crucial part of their
everyday lives and that they have many different uses for snow that they perceive snow
differently than someone who lives in a less snow-dependent environment. Pullum has
since dispelled this myth in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991). He
shows that while the Inuit use many different terms for snow, other languages transmit
the same ideas using phrases instead of single words.

Despite all these problems facing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there have been several
studies performed that support at least the weaker linguistic relativity hypothesis. In
1954, Brown and Lenneberg tested for color codability, or how speakers of one language
categorize the color spectrum and how it affects their recognition of those colors. Penn
writes, "Lenneberg reports on a study showing how terms of colors influence the actual
discrimination. English-speaking subjects were better able to re-recognize those hues
which are easily named in English. This finding is clearly in support of the limiting
influence of linguistic categories on cognition" (1972:16). Schlesinger explains the path
taken in this study from positive correlation to support for linguistic relativity: "...if
codability of color affected recognizability, and if languages differed in codability, then
recognizability is a function of the individual's language" (1991:27)

Lucy and Shweder's color memory test (1979) also supports the linguistic relativity
hypothesis. If a language has terms for discriminating between color then actual
discrimination/perception of those colors will be affected. Lucy and Shweder found that
influences on color recognition memory is mediated exclusively by basic color terms–a
language factor.

Kay and Kempton's language study (1984) found support for linguistic relativity. They
found that language is a part of cognition. In their study, English speakers' perceptions
were distorted in the blue-green area while speakers from Tarahumara–who lack a blue-
green distinction–showed no distortion. However, under certain conditions they found
that universalism of color distinction can be recovered.

Peterson and Siegal's "Sally doll" test (1995) was not intended to test the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis specifically, but their findings support linguistic relativity in a population who
at the time had not yet been considered for testing–deaf children. Peterson and Siegal's
experiment with deaf children showed a difference in the constructed reality of deaf
children with deaf parents and deaf children with hearing parents, especially in the realm
of non-concrete items such as feelings and thoughts.

Most recently, Wassman and Dasen's Balinese language test (1998) found differences in
how the Balinese people orient themselves spatially to that of Westerners. They found
that the use of an absolute reference system based on geographic points on the island in
the Balinese language correlates to the significant cultural importance of these points to
the people. They questioned how language affects the thinking of the Balinese people and
found moderate linguistic relativity results.
There are, on the other hand, several studies that dispute the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Most of these studies favor universalism over relativism in the realm of linguistic
structure and function. For example, Osgood's common meaning system study found that
"human beings the world over, no matter what their language or culture, do share a
common meaning system, do organize experience along similar symbolic dimensions"
(1963:33)

In his universalism studies, Greenberg came to the conclusion that "agreement in the
fundamentals of human behavior among speakers of radically diverse languages far
outweighs the idiosyncratic differences to be expected from a radical theory of linguistic
relativity" (1963:125).

Alford's interpretation of Whorf shows that Whorf never intended for perception of the
color spectrum to be used to defend his principle of linguistic relativity. Alford states, "In
fact, he is quite clear in stating that perception is clearly distinct from conception and
cognition, or language-related thinking" (1980).

Even Dr. Roger Brown, who was one of the first researchers to find empirical support for
the hypothesis, now argues that there is much more evidence pointing toward cognitive
universalism rather than linguistic relativity (Schlesinger 1991:26).

Berlin and Kay's color study (1969) found universal focus colors and differences only in
the boundaries of colors in the spectrum. They found that regardless of language or
culture, eleven universal color foci emerge. Underlying apparent diversity in color
vocabularies, these universal foci remain recognizable. Even in languages which do not
discriminate to eleven basic colors, speakers are nonetheless able to sort color chips
based on the eleven focus colors.

Davies' cross-cultural color sorting test (1998) found an obvious pattern in the similarity
of color sorting behavior between speakers of English which has eleven basic colors,
Russian which has twelve (they distinguish two blues), and Setswana which has only five
(grue=green-blue). Davies concluded that the data showed strong universalism.

Culture influences the structure and functions of a group's language, which in turn
influences the individual's interpretations of reality. Whorf saw language and culture as
two inseparable sides of a single coin. According to Alford, "Whorf sensed something
‘chicken-and-egg-y' about the language-culture interaction phenomenon" (1980). Indeed,
deciding which came first the language or the culture is impossible to discern.
Schlesinger notes that Whorf recognized two directions of influence–from culture to
language and vice versa. However, according to Schlesinger, Whorf argues that "since
grammar is more resistant to change than culture, the influence from language to culture
is predominant" (1991:17).

Language reinforces cultural patterns through semantics, syntax and naming. Grammar
and the forms of words show hierarchical importance of something to a culture.
However, the common color perception tests are not strongly linked to cultural
experience. Schlesinger agrees: "Whorf made far-reaching claims about the pervasive
effects of language on the mental life of a people, and all that experimental psychologists
managed to come up with were such modest results as the effect of the vocabulary of a
language on the discriminability of color chips" (1991:30).

In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown attempted to separate language and culture to test the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He suggested the creation of a new language–one not bound to
any particular culture--to distinguish the causes from the effects of language, culture, and
thought. He called this artificial language LOGLAN, which is short for Logical
Language. According to Riner, LOGLAN was designed as an experimental language to
answer the question: "In what ways is human thought limited and directed by the
language in which one thinks?" (1990).

Today with the help of the Internet, many people around the world are learning
LOGLAN. Riner appears positive in the continuing work with LOGLAN to test the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
"As far as we can yet know, LOGLAN can accommodate precisely and unambiguously
the native ways of saying things in any natural language. In fact, because it is logically
rigorous, LOGLAN forces the speaker to make the metaphysical (cultural, worldview)
premises in and of the natural language explicit in rendering the thought into
(disambiguated) LOGLAN. Those assumptions, made explicit, become propositions that
are open for critical review and amendment–so not only can the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
be tested, but its details can be investigated with LOGLAN" (1990).

Further research and linguistic development is necessary to find out if LOGLAN will
defend or dispute the theory of linguistic relativism.

Other aspects of this hypothesis which warrant further research include another look at
Peterson and Siegal's study involving deaf children, and Lucy's suggestion of a new
theoretical account of language and thought. In Peterson and Siegal's study there are
revealed two naturally occurring groups–deaf children of hearing parents and deaf
children of deaf parents--which allow for a within culture test of linguistic relativity
(Skoyles 1999). Their results offer direct evidence that language molds thought.
Additional research in this area with specific testing of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in
mind could prove successful. Also, Lucy states that all linguistic relativity proposals
claim that language has some influence on thoughts about reality. He further suggests that
"a theoretical account needs to articulate exactly how languages interpret experiences and
how those interpretations influence thought" (1997:291).

In his introduction to Whorf's body of work, John Carroll suggests a reason why so much
attention and controversy surround the theory of linguistic relativism. Carroll states,
"Perhaps it is the suggestion that all one's life one has been tricked, all unaware, by the
structure of language into a certain way of perceiving reality, with the implication that
awareness of this trickery will enable one to see the world with fresh insight" (1956:27).
The world is getting smaller with the diffusion of computers and new communications
technology. Interaction between members of different cultures is becoming easier and
more prevalent. On a global scale, the hypothesis could be taken as a possible
rationalization why foreign nations fail to communicate successfully. Awareness of
linguistic relativity, however, should lead to a better understanding of cultural diversities
and help to bridge intercultural communication gaps.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Linguistic relativity
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v•d•e

The linguistic relativity principle, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,[1] is the idea that
differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way
people think, so that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because
of it. A strong version of the hypothesis holds that language determines thought and that
linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. A weaker version states
that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic
behaviour.

The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von
Humboldt who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. The early 20th
century school of American Anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also
embraced the idea. Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary
proponent of the hypothesis, because he published observations of how he perceived
linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behaviour. Whorf's
ideas were widely criticised, and Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg decided to put them
to the test. They reformulated Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity as a testable
hypothesis, now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and conducted experiments designed
to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified
colors differently. As the study of the universal nature of human language and cognition
came in to focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of favor. A 1969
study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that color terminology is subject to universal
semantic constraints, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was seen as completely discredited.

From the late 1980s a new school of linguistic relativity scholars have examined the
effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for
weak versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.[2] Effects of linguistic relativity
have been shown particularly in the domain of spatial cognition and in the social use of
language, but also in the field of color perception. Recent studies have shown that color
perception is particularly prone to linguistic relativity effects when processed in the left
brain hemisphere, suggesting that this brain half relies more on language than the right
one.[3] Currently a balanced view of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists
holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways
but that other processes are better seen as subject to universal factors. Current research is
focused on exploring the ways in which language influences thought and determining to
what extent.[2] The principle of linguistic relativity and the relation between language and
thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to
psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and
the invention of constructed languages.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 History
o 1.1 Benjamin Lee Whorf
o 1.2 Eric Lenneberg
o 1.3 The universalist period
o 1.4 Fishman's 'Whorfianism of the third kind'
o 1.5 Cognitive linguistics
o 1.6 Present status
• 2 Empirical research
o 2.1 Color terminology research
• 3 Linguistic relativity and artificial languages
o 3.1 Programming languages
o 3.2 Experimental languages
• 4 See also
• 5 Notes
• 6 References
• 7 Further reading

• 8 External links
 [edit] History
The idea that language and thought are intertwined goes back to the classical
civilizations, but in the history of European philosophy the relation was not seen as
fundamental. St. Augustine for example held the view that language was merely labels
applied to already existing concepts.[4] Others held the opinion that language was but a
veil covering up the eternal truths hiding them from real human experience. For
Immanuel Kant, language was but one of several tools used by humans to experience the
world. In the late 18th and early 19th century the idea of the existence of different
national characters, or "Volksgeister", of different ethnic groups was the moving force
behind the German school of national romanticism and the beginning ideologies of ethnic
nationalism.

In 1820 Wilhelm von Humboldt connected the study of language to the national
romanticist program by proposing the view that language is the very fabric of thought,
that is that thoughts are produced as a kind of inner dialog using the same grammar as the
thinker's native language.[5] This view was part of a larger picture in which the world
view of an ethnic nation, their "Weltanschauung", was seen as being faithfully reflected
in the grammar of their language. Von Humboldt argued that languages with an
inflectional morphological type, such as German, English and the other Indo-European
languages were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the
dominance of their speakers over the speakers of less perfect languages.

Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views
of the world.[5]

The idea that some languages were naturally superior to others and that the use of
primitive languages maintained their speakers in intellectual poverty was widespread in
the early 20th century. The American linguist William Dwight Whitney for example
actively strove to eradicate the native American languages arguing that their speakers
were savages and would be better off abandoning their languages and learning English
and adopting a civilized way of life.[6] The first anthropologist and linguist to challenge
this view was Franz Boas who was educated in Germany in the late 19th century where
he received his doctorate in physics.[7] While undertaking geographical research in
northern Canada he became fascinated with the Inuit people and decided to become an
ethnographer. In contrast to von Humboldt, Boas always stressed the equal worth of all
cultures and languages, and argued that there was no such thing as primitive languages,
but that all languages were capable of expressing the same content albeit by widely
differing means. Boas saw language as an inseparable part of culture and he was among
the first to require of ethnographers to learn the native language of the culture being
studied, and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends in the original
language.

According to Franz Boas:

It does not seem likely [...] that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe
and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded
by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned
by the morphological traits of the language."[8]

Boas' student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that languages
contained the key to understanding the differing world views of peoples. In his writings
he espoused the viewpoint that because of the staggering differences in the grammatical
systems of languages no two languages were ever similar enough to allow for perfect
translation between them. Sapir also thought because language represented reality
differently, it followed that the speakers of different languages would perceive reality
differently. According to Edward Sapir:

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same
social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely
the same world with different labels attached.[9]

On the other hand, Sapir explicitly rejected pure linguistic determinism, by stating that:

It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern

expressed in language.
[10]

While Sapir never made a point of studying how languages affected the thought
processes of their speakers the notion of linguistic relativity lay inherent in his basic
understanding of language, and it would be taken up by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf.

[edit] Benjamin Lee Whorf

More than any other linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he
himself called "the principle of linguistic relativity". Instead of merely assuming that
language influences the thought and behavior of its speakers (after Humboldt and Sapir)
he looked at Native American languages and attempted to account for the ways in which
differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers
perceived the world. Whorf has been criticized by many, often pointing to his 'amateur'
status, thereby insinuating that he was unqualified and could thereby be dismissed.
However, his not having a degree in linguistics cannot be taken to mean that he was
linguistically incompetent. Indeed, John Lucy writes "despite his 'amateur' status, Whorf's
work in linguistics was and still is recognized as being of superb professional quality by
linguists".[11] Still, detractors such as Eric Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker
have criticized him for not being sufficiently clear in his formulation of how he meant
languages influences thought, and for not providing actual proof of his assumptions. Most
of his arguments were in the form of examples that were anecdotal or speculative in
nature, and functioned as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were
connected to what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. In Whorf's words:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types
that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare
every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux
of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the
linguistic systems of 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 [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence
to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can
in some way be calibrated.[12]

Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances
where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with
one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE
"Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the
well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied
languages). One of Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow'
in the Inuit language, which has later been shown to be a misrepresentation[13] but also for
example how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for drinking
water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served
the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine
grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between
two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always
possible.

Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects behavior
came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance
company as a fire inspector[13]. On inspecting a chemical plant he once observed that the
plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the
empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room
for full barrels no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was
potentially much more dangerous due to the highly flammable vapors that still existed in
the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word 'empty' in connection to the barrels had
led the workers to unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they
were probably aware of the risk of explosion from the vapors. This example was later
criticized by Lenneberg[14] as not actually demonstrating the causality between the use of
the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular
reasoning. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that
this was a failing of human sight rather than language.

Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what
he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual
category among the Hopi.[15] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE
languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct,
countable instances, like "three days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and
consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this
view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi
behavioral patterns.

Whorf died in 1941 at age 44 and left behind him a number of unpublished papers. His
line of thought was continued by linguists and anthropologists such as Harry Hoijer and
Dorothy D. Lee who both continued investigations into the effect of language on habitual
thought, and George L. Trager who prepared a number of Whorf's left-behind papers for
publishing. Hoijer, who was one of Sapir's students, was also the first to use the term
"Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" about the complex of ideas about linguistic relativity expressed
in the work of those two linguists.[16] The most important event for the dissemination of
Whorf's ideas to a larger public was the publication in 1956 of his major writings on the
topic of linguistic relativity in a single volume titled "Language, Thought and Reality"
edited by J. B. Carroll.

[edit] Eric Lenneberg

In 1953 psychologist Eric Lenneberg published a detailed criticism of the line of thought
that had been fundamental for Sapir and Whorf. He criticized Whorf's examples from an
objectivist view of language holding that languages are principally meant to represent
events in the real world and that even though different languages express these ideas in
different ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the
speaker are equivalent. He argued that when Whorf was describing in English how a
Hopi speaker's view of time was different, he was in fact translating the Hopi concept
into English and therefore disproving the existence of linguistic relativity. He did not
address the fact that Whorf was not principally concerned with translatability, but rather
with how the habitual use of language influences habitual behavior. Whorf's point was
that while English speakers may be able to understand how a Hopi speaker thinks, they
are not actually able to think in that way.[17]

Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he had never actually shown the
causality between a linguistic phenomenon and a phenomenon in the realm of thought or
behavior, but merely assumed it to be there. Together with his colleague, Roger Brown,
Lenneberg proposed that in order to prove such a causality one would have to be able to
directly correlate linguistic phenomena with behavior. They took up the task of proving
or disproving the existence of linguistic relativity experimentally and published their
findings in 1954.

Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated an actual hypothesis, Brown & Lenneberg
formulated one based on a condensation of the different expressions of the notion of
linguistic relativity in their works. They identified the two tenets of the Whorf thesis as
(i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic
communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure".[18] These two
tenets were later developed by Roger Brown into the so-called "weak" and "strong"
formulation respectively:
1. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by
nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the
language.
2. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the
worldview he will acquire as he learns the language.[19]

It is these two formulations of Roger Brown's which have become widely known and
attributed to Whorf and Sapir while in fact the second formulation, verging on linguistic
determinism, was never advanced by either of them.

Since Brown & Lenneberg believed that the objective reality denoted by language was
the same for speakers of all languages, they decided to test how different languages
codified the same message differently and whether differences in codification could be
proven to affect behavior.

They designed a number of experiments involving the codification of colors. In their first
experiment, they investigated whether it was easier for speakers of English to remember
color shades for which they had a specific name than to remember colors that were not as
easily definable by words. This allowed them to correlate the linguistic categorization
directly to a non-linguistic task, that of recognizing and remembering colors. In a later
experiment, speakers of two languages that categorize colors differently (English and
Zuni) were asked to perform tasks of color recognition. In this way, it could be
determined whether the differing color categories of the two speakers would determine
their ability to recognize nuances within color categories. Brown & Lenneberg in fact
found that Zuñi speakers who classify green and blue together as a single category did
have trouble recognizing and remembering nuances within the green/blue category.
Brown & Lenneberg's study became the beginning of a tradition of investigation of the
linguistic relativity through color terminology (see below).

[edit] The universalist period

Lenneberg was also one of the first cognitive scientists to begin development of the
Universalist theory of language which was finally formulated by Noam Chomsky in the
form of Universal Grammar, effectively arguing that all languages share the same
underlying structure. The Chomskyan school also holds the belief that linguistic
structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific
languages – the knowledge acquired by learning a language – are merely surface
phenomena and do not affect cognitive processes that are universal to all human beings.
This theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s
through the 1980s and the notion of linguistic relativity fell out of favor and became even
the object of ridicule.[20]

An example of the influence of universalist theory in the 1960s is the studies by Brent
Berlin and Paul Kay who continued Lenneberg's research in color terminology. Berlin
and Kay studied color terminology formation in languages and showed clear universal
trends in color naming. For example, they found that even though languages have
different color terminologies, they generally recognize certain hues as more focal than
others. They showed that in languages with few color terms, it is predictable from the
number of terms which hues are chosen as focal colors, for example, languages with only
three color terms always have the focal colors black, white and red.[21] The fact that what
had been believed to be random differences between color naming in different languages
could be shown to follow universal patterns was seen as a powerful argument against
linguistic relativity.[22] Berlin and Kay's research has since been criticized by relativists
such as John A. Lucy, who has argued that Berlin and Kay's conclusions were skewed by
their insistence that color terms should encode only color information.[23] This, Lucy
argues, made them blind to the instances in which color terms provided other information
that might be considered examples of linguistic relativity. For more information
regarding the universalism and relativism of color terms, see Universalism and relativism
of color terminology.

Other universalist researchers dedicated themselves to dispelling other notions of

linguistic relativity, often attacking specific points and examples given by Whorf. For
example, Ekkehart Malotki's monumental study of time expressions in Hopi presented
many examples that challenged Whorf's interpretation of Hopi language and culture as
being "timeless"[24].

Today many followers of the universalist school of thought still oppose the idea of
linguistic relativity. For example, Steven Pinker argues in his book The Language
Instinct that thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any
fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural"
language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-
language, preceding any natural language, called "mentalese." Pinker attacks what he
calls "Whorf's radical position," declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments,
the less sense they make."[25]

Pinker and other universalist opponents of the linguistic relativity hypothesis have been
accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen
put up by themselves.[26]

[edit] Fishman's 'Whorfianism of the third kind'

Joshua Fishman argued that Whorf's true position was for a long time largely overlooked
by most linguists. In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a 'neo-Herderian champion'[27]
and in 1982, he proposed his 'Whorfianism of the third kind' in an attempt to refocus
linguists' attention on what he claimed was Whorf's real interest, namely the intrinsic
value of 'little peoples' and 'little languages'.[28] Whorf himself had expressed the
sentiment thus:

But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English […] is to lose a power of thought
which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the
greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. […] We handle even our plain
English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual
awareness.[29]

Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that
language influences thought and the strong version that language determines thought,
Fishman's 'Whorfianism of the third kind' proposes that language is a key to culture.

[edit] Cognitive linguistics

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, advances in cognitive psychology and cognitive
linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.[30] One of those who adopted a
more Whorfian approach was George Lakoff. He argued that language is often used
metaphorically and that different languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal
something about how speakers of that language think. For example, English employs
metaphors likening time with money, whereas other languages may not talk about time in
that fashion. Other linguistic metaphors may be common to most languages because they
are based on general human experience, for example, metaphors likening up with good
and bad with down. Lakoff also argues that metaphor plays an important part in political
debates where it matters whether one is arguing in favor of the "right to life" or against
the "right to choose"; whether one is discussing "illegal aliens" or "undocumented
workers".

In his book Women, Fire and Dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind,
[31]
Lakoff reappraised the hypothesis of linguistic relativity and especially Whorf's views
about how linguistic categorization reflects and/or influences mental categories. He
concluded that the debate on linguistic relativity had been confused and resultingly
fruitless. He identified four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions
about what constitutes linguistic relativity. One parameter is the degree and depth of
linguistic relativity. Some scholars believe that a few examples of superficial differences
in language and associated behavior are enough to demonstrate the existence of linguistic
relativity, while other contend that only deep differences that permeate the linguistic and
cultural system suffice as proof. A second parameter is whether conceptual systems are to
be seen as absolute or whether they can be expanded or exchanged during the life time of
a human being. A third parameter is whether translatability is accepted as a proof of
similarity or difference between concept systems or whether it is rather the actual
habitual use of linguistic expressions that is to be examined. A fourth parameter is
whether to view the locus of linguistic relativity as being in the language or in the mind.
Lakoff concluded that since many of Whorf's critics had criticized him using definitions
of linguistic relativity that Whorf did not himself use, their criticisms were often
ineffective.

The publication of the 1996 anthology Rethinking linguistic relativity edited by

sociolinguist John J. Gumperz and psycholinguist Stephen C. Levinson marked the
entrance to a new period of linguistic relativity studies and a new way of defining the
concept that focused on cognitive as well as social aspects of linguistic relativity. The
book included studies by cognitive linguists sympathetic to the hypothesis as well as
some working in the opposing universalist tradition. In this volume, cognitive and social
scientists laid out a new paradigm for investigations in linguistic relativity. Levinson
presented research results documenting rather significant linguistic relativity effects in
the linguistic conceptualization of spatial categories between different languages. Two
separate studies by Melissa Bowerman and Dan I. Slobin treated the role of language in
cognitive processes. Bowerman showed that certain cognitive processes did not use
language to any significant extent and therefore could not be subject to effects of
linguistic relativity. Slobin on the other hand, described another kind of cognitive process
that he named "thinking for speaking" – the kind of processes in which perceptional data
and other kinds of prelinguistic cognition are translated into linguistic terms for the
purpose of communicating them to others. These, Slobin argues, are the kinds of
cognitive process that are at the root of linguistic relativity.

[edit] Present status

Current researchers such as Lera Boroditsky or Debi Roberson believe that language
influences thought, but in more limited ways than the broadest early claims. Exploring
these parameters has sparked novel research that increases both scope and precision of
prior examinations. Current studies of linguistic relativity are neither marked by the naive
approach to exotic linguistic structures and their often merely presumed effect on thought
that marked the early period, nor are they ridiculed and discouraged as in the universalist
period. Instead of proving or disproving a theory, researchers in linguistic relativity now
examine the interface between thought, language and culture, and describe the degree and
kind of interrelatedness. Usually, following the tradition of Lenneberg, they use
experimental data to back up their conclusions.

[edit] Empirical research

John Lucy has identified three main strands of research into linguistic relativity.[32] The
first is what he calls the "structure centered" approach. This approach starts with
observing a structural peculiarity in a language and goes on to examine its possible
ramifications for thought and behavior. The first example of this kind of research is
Whorf's observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi
and English. More recent research in this vein is the research made by John Lucy
describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers
in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to
material rather than to shape as preferred by speakers of English.[33]

The second strand of research is the "domain centered" approach, in which a semantic
domain is chosen and compared across linguistic and cultural groups for correlations
between linguistic encoding and behavior. The main strand of domain centered research
has been the research on color terminology, although this domain according to Lucy and
admitted by color terminology researchers such as Paul Kay, is not optimal for studying
linguistic relativity, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is known to
be hard wired into the neural system and as such subject to more universal restrictions
than other semantic domains. Since the tradition of research on color terminology is by
far the largest area of research into linguistic relativity it is described below in its own
section. Another semantic domain which has proven fruitful for studies of linguistic
relativity is the domain of space.[34] Spatial categories vary greatly between languages and
recent research has shown that speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space
in performing many quotidian tasks. Research carried out by Stephen C Levinson and
other cognitive scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has
reported three basic kinds of spatial categorization and while many languages use
combinations of them some languages exhibit only one kind of spatial categorization and
corresponding differences in behavior. For example the Australian language Guugu
Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations — the position
of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. A speaker of Guugu yimithirr
will define a person as being "north of the house", while a speaker of English may say
that he is "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house" depending on the speaker's
point of view. This difference makes Guugu yimithirr speakers better at performing some
kinds of tasks, such as finding and describing locations in open terrain, whereas English
speakers perform better in tasks regarding the positioning of objects relative to the
speaker (For example telling someone to set the table putting forks to the right of the
plate and knives to the left would be extremely difficult in Guugu yimithirr).[35]

The third strand of research is the "behavior centered" approach which starts by
observing different behavior between linguistic groups and then proceeds to search for
possible causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. This kind of approach was used
by Whorf when he attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers'
use of the word 'empty' to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors. One
study in this line of research has been conducted by Bloom who noticed that speakers of
Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in
a questionnaire. After a study he concluded that this was related to the way in which
counter-factuality is marked grammatically in the Chinese language. Another line of
study by Frode Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of
work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive
differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases
could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process where
Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker.[36]

Other research of importance to the study of linguistic relativity has been Daniel Everett's
studies of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon. Everett observed several
peculiarities in Pirahã culture that corresponded with linguistically rare features. The
Pirahã for example have neither numbers nor color terms in the way those are normally
defined, and correspondingly they don't count or classify colors in the way other cultures
do. Furthermore when Everett tried to instruct them in basic mathematics they proved
unresponsive. Everett did not draw the conclusion that it was the lack of numbers in their
language that prevented them from grasping mathematics, but instead concluded that the
Pirahã had a cultural ideology that made them extremely reluctant to adopt new cultural
traits, and that this cultural ideology was also the reason that certain linguistic features
that were otherwise believed to be universal did not exist in their language. Critics have
argued that if the test subjects are unable to count for some other reason (perhaps because
they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice
doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers.[37]
That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack
of corresponding vocabulary.

[edit] Color terminology research

Main article: Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate

The tradition of using the semantic domain of color names as an object for investigation
of linguistic relativity began with Lenneberg and Roberts 1953 study of Zuni color terms
and color memory, and Brown and Lennebergs 1954 study of English color terms and
color memory. The studies showed a correlation between the availability of color terms
for specific colors and the ease with which those colors were remembered in both
speakers of Zuni and English. Researchers concluded that this had to do with properties
of the focal colors having higher codability than less focal colors, and not with linguistic
relativity effects. Berlin and Kay's 1969 study of color terms across languages concluded
that there are universal typological principles of color naming that are determined by
biological factors with little or no room for relativity related effects.[38] This study sparked
a long tradition of studies in to the typological universals of color terminology. Some
researchers such as John A Lucy[39], Barbara Saunders[40] and Stephen C Levinson[41] have
argued that Berlin and Kays study does not in fact show that linguistic relativity in color
naming is impossible, because of a number of basic unsupported assumptions in their
study (such as whether all cultures in fact have a category of "color" that can be
unproblematically defined and equated with the one found in Indo-European languages)
and because of problems with their data stemming from those basic assumptions. Other
researchers such as Robert E. Maclaury have continued investigation into the evolution of
color names in specific languages refining the possibilities of basic color term
inventories. Like Berlin and Kay, Maclaury found no significant room for linguistic
relativity in this domain, but rather as Berlin and Kay concluded that the domain is
governed mostly by physical-biological universals of human color perception.[42][43]

[edit] Linguistic relativity and artificial languages

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis influenced the development and standardization of
Interlingua during the first half of the 20th Century, but this was largely due to Sapir's
direct involvement.

[edit] Programming languages

Kenneth E. Iverson, the originator of the APL programming language, believed that the
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages (without actually mentioning the
hypothesis by name). His Turing award lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought", was
devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about
computer algorithms.[44]
The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes, such as a conceptual hierarchy of
computer languages, with more expressive and succinct languages at the top. Thus, the
so-called blub paradox (after a hypothetical programming language of average
complexity called 'Blub') says that anyone preferentially using some particular
programming language will 'know' that it is more powerful than some, but not that it is
less powerful than others. The reason is that writing in some language means thinking in
that language. Hence the paradox, because typically programmers are “satisfied with
whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about
programs”.[45]

In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the

programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the
language was the science fiction novel Babel-17, based on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
[46]

[edit] Experimental languages

Main article: Experimental languages

An experimental language is a constructed language designed for the purpose of

exploring some element in the theory of linguistics. Many experimental languages are
concerned with the relation between language and thought.

[edit] See also

• Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
• Eskimo words for snow
• Language and thought
• Linguistic anthropology
• Linguistic Determinism
• Relativism
• Newspeak

[edit] Notes
1. ^ This usage is now generally seen as a misnomer. As Jane Hill and Bruce
Mannheim write:Yet, just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor
Roman, nor an Empire the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" is neither consistent with
the writings of Sapir and Whorf, nor a hypothesis (Hill & Mannheim 1992)
2. ^ a b Koerner, E.F.K."Towards a full pedigree of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:from
Locke to Lucy" Chapter in Pütz & Verspoor 2000:17"
3. ^ Drivonikou et al. 2007, Gilbert et al. 2008
4. ^ Gumperz & Levinson 1997:2
5. ^ a b Trabant, Jürgen."How relativistic are Humboldts "Weltansichten"?" chapter
in Pütz & Verspoor 2000
 6. ^ Seuren 1998:180
7. ^ Seuren 1998:181
8. ^ Boas, Franz (1911), Handbook of American Ind

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
The argument that language defines the way a person behaves and thinks has
existed since the early 1900's when Edward Sapir first identified the concept. He
believed that language and the thoughts that we have are somehow interwoven,
and that all people are equally being effected by the confines of their language. In
short, he made all people out to be mental prisoners; unable to think freely
because of the restrictions of their vocabularies.

An example of this idea is given in George Orwell's book 1984, in which he

discusses the use of a language entitled "newspeak" which was created to change
the way people thought about the government. The new vocabulary they were
given was created to control their minds. Since they could not think of things not
included in the vocabulary, they were to be zombies imprisoned by the trance of
their language. Soon, Sapir had a student, Benjamin Whorf, who picked up on the
idea of linguistic determinism and really made it his own. Whorf coined what was
once called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is more properly referred to as the
Whorf hypothesis. This states that language is not simply a way of voicing ideas,
but is the very thing which shapes those ideas. One cannot think outside the
confines of their language. The result of this process is many different world
views by speakers of different languages.

Whorf fully believed in linguistic determinism; that what one thinks is fully
determined by their language. He also supported linguistic relativity, which states
that the differences in language reflect the different views of different people. An
example of this is the studies Whorf did on the Hopi language. He studied a Hopi
speaker who lived in New York city near Whorf. He concluded that Hopi speakers
do not include tense in their sentences, and therefore must have a different sense
of time than other groups of people. However, in recent years, the Hopi have
been studied in order to further understand this issue, and it has been discovered
that although the Hopi do not include references to the past, present or future in
their grammars, they do include two other tenses, manifested and becoming
manifested. Manifested includes all that is and ever has been, physically. This
includes the senses and concrete items. Becoming manifested includes anything
which is not physical, has no definite origin and cannot be perceived with the
senses. Verbs are always expressed within terms of these two tenses. In this way,
the Hopi do include some aspect of time, but in a different way than a native
English speaker would recognize. Perhaps Whorf's data would have been more
conclusive had he spent time visiting many Hopi speakers in their native
environments instead of studying one man and only visiting his place of origin
once. Perhaps what Whorf recorded was merely part of that speaker's ideolect,
and was not reflective of the entire Hopi community.
If the world view and behavior of people are affected so severely by the structure
of their language, and languages have different structures, then is cross-cultural
communication and understanding a realistic goal for the modern world? Whorf
would have us believe that such barrier-free communication is almost impossible.
However, does that explain current world trade agreements, joint business
ventures with foreign companies or the emphasis on raising bilingual societies?
Sure, not every word of communication between people of different language
communities is expressed. But despite that fact, I believe that the substance of
the messages are getting across. Using the universal languages of law and science,
people from all over the world are working together with no major barrier
because of differing mother tongues.

There is no question that the lexicon of a specific language mirrors whatever the
nonverbal culture emphasizes. For example, aspects of the society which are not
associated directly with language seem to have a direct impact on the formation
of language. A society where horses are revered will have many words for horses
and horse things- not because horses talk, but because people talk about their
horses. Important parts of a society are certainly highlighted in the vocabulary of
a language. For example, the Eskimos have many words for snow, the Americans
for cars and the Norwegians for fish. But does that mean that the other cultures
are incapable of perceiving the items which are described with such specific
vocabulary elsewhere? I don't think so. I can identify many types of snow using
phrases, and I'm sure that in most cases, with most languages, such a translation
can be made. The idea that the absence in a given language for equivalent terms
between the differing vocabularies must always be associated with a different
cognitive world perception is to me, far fetched.

The example of kin terms across cultures is a good example of how vocabulary
does not define our ideas. For example, in the Arapaho culture, there is but one
word for a blood-related, senior male relative. Where an English speaker would
use either "father" and "uncle", the Arapaho use just one to describe both
relatives. Is this to suggest that they are totally unaware of and cannot
comprehend the difference between the two relationships? Cultural
anthropologists throughout the decades have proven that people do understand
the difference, even if the terms used are the same. They may put both kin
members in the same relationship category as far as what the expected duties of
each are, but a child is always aware that one of the men is her father, and the
other his brother.

I think a more appropriate way to address the differences in languages and

cultures around the world is to identify the differences in the categories groups of
people use to define their vocabularies, as Romaine suggests. I believe that
language users sort out and distinguish their experiences differently according to
the categories provided by their languages. One culture could consider a tree an
inanimate object. Another culture may consider it to be a living thing, just like a
human. The grammar of each language would reflect this difference, and the idea
of what a tree is to the two groups would be physically similar, but carry different
connotations and emotional responses. One culture may use the gender neutral
term for an item which is considered feminine or masculine in another culture.
For example in German, the definite articles are either der, die or das. These
grammatical distinctions may have an effect on the way the noun following is
thought of. This is an aspect of language which has a direct effect on the
connotation of the term.

Similarly, a personal experience in the confines of one language may actually

physically be the same as one occurring in another language group, and although
both people are fully aware cognitively of what is happening, their interpretation
and value of what happened may be completely different based on the cultural
guidelines set forth by their languages. This concept does not just apply to
members of different cultures, but also to members of the same language
community. Definitions of words are documented in dictionaries, yet an
individual's use and understanding of them are sometimes different that the use
and understanding of his or her neighbor.

If the English language was somehow keeping us from freedom of thought, we

would all be trapped in the same cognitive path if we were English speakers. Even
among siblings, the understanding of certain words and what they mean varies.
This is due to different environmental factors, personal interests, friends,
teachers and perhaps an age difference. Two people who live in the same house,
with the same genetic make-up and speak the same language should have the
same cognitive processes if we were prisoners of our language. We are obviously
not. Although I personally find Whorf's hypothesis to be wanting in many areas, I
believe that discussion about this topic is an important part of the globalization
and cultural education in the world today. Through theories like this one, we can
identify ways in which all languages are universal and how that universality in
language is beneficial to us all. I think when all people realize that no matter
which language you speak or which cultural norms you are used to, everyone is
capable of intellectual thoughts, poetic visions, technical jargon and personal
feelings according to their own experiences, the world will be a much smaller
place.

Author: Amy Stafford

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Daniel Chandler
Greek Translation now available

Within linguistic theory, two extreme positions concerning

the relationship between language and thought are
commonly referred to as 'mould theories’ and 'cloak
theories'. Mould theories represent language as 'a mould in
terms of which thought categories are cast' (Bruner et al.
1956, p. 11). Cloak theories represent the view that
'language is a cloak conforming to the customary categories
of thought of its speakers' (ibid.). The doctrine that
language is the 'dress of thought' was fundamental in Neo-
Classical literary theory (Abrams 1953, p. 290), but was
rejected by the Romantics (ibid.; Stone 1967, Ch. 5). There
is also a related view (held by behaviourists, for instance)
that language and thought are identical. According to this
stance thinking is entirely linguistic: there is no 'non-verbal
thought', no 'translation' at all from thought to language. In
this sense, thought is seen as completely determined by
language.

The Sapir-Whorf theory, named after the American

linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, is a
mould theory of language. Writing in 1929, Sapir argued in
a classic passage that:

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 particular 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.
The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a
large extent unconsciously built upon the language
habits of the group. No two languages are ever
sufficiently similar to be considered as representing
the same social reality. The worlds in which
different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely
the same world with different labels attached... We
see and hear and otherwise experience very largely
as we do because the language habits of our
community predispose certain choices of
interpretation. (Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69)
This position was extended in the 1930s by his student
Whorf, who, in another widely cited passage, declared that:
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 because 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. The agreement is, of course, an implicit
and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely
obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by
subscribing to the organization and classification of
data which the agreement decrees. (Whorf 1940, pp.
213-14; his emphasis)
I will not attempt to untangle the details of the personal
standpoints of Sapir and Whorf on the degree of
determinism which they felt was involved, although I think
that the above extracts give a fair idea of what these were. I
should note that Whorf distanced himself from the
behaviourist stance that thinking is entirely linguistic
(Whorf 1956, p. 66). In its most extreme version 'the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis' can be described as consisting of two
associated principles. According to the first, linguistic
determinism, our thinking is determined by language.
According to the second, linguistic relativity, people who
speak different languages perceive and think about the
world quite differently.

On this basis, the Whorfian perspective is that translation

between one language and another is at the very least,
problematic, and sometimes impossible. Some
commentators also apply this to the 'translation' of
unverbalized thought into language. Others suggest that
even within a single language any reformulation of words
has implications for meaning, however subtle. George
Steiner (1975) has argued that any act of human
communication can be seen as involving a kind of
translation, so the potential scope of Whorfianism is very
broad indeed. Indeed, seeing reading as a kind of
translation is a useful reminder of the reductionism of
representing textual reformulation simply as a determinate
'change of meaning', since meaning does not reside in the
text, but is generated by interpretation. According to the
Whorfian stance, 'content' is bound up with linguistic
'form', and the use of the medium contributes to shaping the
meaning. In common usage, we often talk of different
verbal formulations 'meaning the same thing'. But for those
of a Whorfian persuasion, such as the literary theorist
Stanley Fish, 'it is impossible to mean the same thing in
two (or more) different ways' (Fish 1980, p. 32).
Reformulating something transforms the ways in which
meanings may be made with it, and in this sense, form and
content are inseparable. From this stance words are not
merely the 'dress' of thought.

The importance of what is 'lost in translation' varies, of

course. The issue is usually considered most important in
literary writing. It is illuminating to note how one poet felt
about the translation of his poems from the original Spanish
into other European languages (Whorf himself did not in
fact regard European languages as significantly different
from each other). Pablo Neruda noted that the best
translations of his own poems were Italian (because of its
similarities to Spanish), but that English and French 'do not
correspond to Spanish - neither in vocalization, or in the
placement, or the colour, or the weight of words.' He
continued: 'It is not a question of interpretative
equivalence: no, the sense can be right, but this correctness
of translation, of meaning, can be the destruction of a
poem. In many of the translations into French - I don't say
in all of them - my poetry escapes, nothing remains; one
cannot protest because it says the same thing that one has
written. But it is obvious that if I had been a French poet, I
would not have said what I did in that poem, because the
value of the words is so different. I would have written
something else' (Plimpton 1981, p. 63). With more
'pragmatic' or less 'expressive' writing, meanings are
typically regarded as less dependent on the particular form
of words used. In most pragmatic contexts, paraphrases or
translations tend to be treated as less fundamentally
problematic. However, even in such contexts, particular
words or phrases which have an important function in the
original language may be acknowledged to present special
problems in translation. Even outside the humanities,
academic texts concerned with the social sciences are a
case in point.

The Whorfian perspective is in strong contrast to the

extreme universalism of those who adopt the cloak theory.
The Neo-Classical idea of language as simply the dress of
thought is based on the assumption that the same thought
can be expressed in a variety of ways. Universalists argue
that we can say whatever we want to say in any language,
and that whatever we say in one language can always be
translated into another. This is the basis for the most
common refutation of Whorfianism. 'The fact is,' insists the
philosopher Karl Popper, 'that even totally different
languages are not untranslatable' (Popper 1970, p. 56). The
evasive use here of 'not untranslatable' is ironic. Most
universalists do acknowledge that translation may on
occasions involve a certain amount of circumlocution.

Individuals who regard writing as fundamental to their

sense of personal and professional identity may experience
their written style as inseparable from this identity, and
insofar as writers are 'attached to their words', they may
favour a Whorfian perspective. And it would be hardly
surprising if individual stances towards Whorfianism were
not influenced by allegiances to Romanticism or
Classicism, or towards either the arts or the sciences. As I
have pointed out, in the context of the written word, the
'untranslatability' claim is generally regarded as strongest in
the arts and weakest in the case of formal scientific papers
(although rhetorical studies have increasingly blurred any
clear distinctions). And within the literary domain,
'untranslatability' was favoured by Romantic literary
theorists, for whom the connotative, emotional or personal
meanings of words were crucial (see Stone 1967, pp. 126-7,
132, 145).

Whilst few linguists would accept the Sapir-Whorf

hypothesis in its 'strong', extreme or deterministic form,
many now accept a 'weak', more moderate, or limited
Whorfianism, namely that the ways in which we see the
world may be influenced by the kind of language we use.
Moderate Whorfianism differs from extreme Whorfianism
in these ways:

 the emphasis is on the potential for thinking to be

'influenced' rather than unavoidably 'determined' by
language;
 it is a two-way process, so that 'the kind of language
we use' is also influenced by 'the way we see the
world';
 any influence is ascribed not to 'Language' as such or
to one language compared with another, but to the
use within a language of one variety rather than
another (typically a sociolect - the language used
primarily by members of a particular social group);
 emphasis is given to the social context of language
use rather than to purely linguistic considerations,
such as the social pressure in particular contexts to
use language in one way rather than another.

Of course, some polemicists still favour the notion of

language as a strait-jacket or prison, but there is a broad
academic consensus favouring moderate Whorfianism. Any
linguistic influence is now generally considered to be
related not primarily to the formal systemic structures of a
language (langue to use de Saussure's term) but to cultural
conventions and individual styles of use (or parole).
Meaning does not reside in a text but arises in its
interpretation, and interpretation is shaped by sociocultural
contexts. Conventions regarding what are considered
appropriate uses of language in particular social contexts
exist both in 'everyday' uses of language and in specialist
usage. In academia, there are general conventions as well
as particular ones in each disciplinary and methodological
context. In every subculture, the dominant conventions
regarding appropriate usage tend to exert a conservative
influence on the framing of phenomena. From the media
theory perspective, the sociolects of sub-cultures and the
idiolects of individuals represent a subtly selective view of
the world: tending to support certain kinds of observations
and interpretations and to restrict others. And this
transformative power goes largely unnoticed, retreating to
transparency.

Marshall McLuhan argued in books such as The Gutenberg

Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) that the
use of new media was the prime cause of fundamental
changes in society and the human psyche. The
technological determinism of his stance can be seen as an
application of extreme Whorfianism to the nature of media
in general. Similarly, the extreme universalism of the cloak
theorists has its media counterpart in the myth of
technological neutrality (Winner 1977; Bowers 1988). My
own approach involves exploring the applicability of
moderate Whorfianism to the use of media.

References

 Abrams, M. H. (1953): The Mirror and the Lamp:

Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
 Bowers, C. A. (1988): The Cultural Dimensions of
Educational Computing: Understanding the Non-
Neutrality of Technology. New York: Teachers
College Press
 Bruner, J. S., J. S. Goodnow & G. A. Austin ([1956]
1962): A Study of Thinking. New York: Wiley
 Fish, S. (1980): Is There a Text in This Class? The
Authority of Interpretative Communities. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press
 McLuhan, M. (1962): The Gutenberg Galaxy: The
Making of Typographic Man. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul
 Language and Thought Processes
Language is more than just a means of communication. It influences our culture
and even our thought processes. During the first four decades of the 20th
century, language was viewed by American linguists and anthropologists as
being more important than it actually is in shaping our perception of reality. This
was mostly due to Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf who said that
language predetermines what we see in the world around us. In other words,
language acts like a polarizing lens on a camera in filtering reality--we see the
real world only in the categories of our language.

Cross cultural comparisons of such things as color terms

were used by Sapir and Whorf as evidence of this
hypothesis. When we perceive color with our eyes, we are
sensing that portion of electromagnetic radiation that is
visible light. In fact, the spectrum of visible light is a
continuum of light waves with frequencies that increase at a
continuous rate from one end to the other. In other words,
there are no distinct colors like red and green in nature. Our
culture, through language, guides us in seeing the spectrum
in terms of the arbitrarily established categories that we call
colors. Different cultures may divide up the spectrum in different ways. This can
be seen in the comparison of some English language colors with their
counterparts in the Tiv language of Nigeria:

Note: value refers to

the lightness or
darkness of a color.
High value is light
and low value is dark.

Sapir and Whorf interpreted these data as indicating that colors are not objective,
naturally determined segments of reality. In other words, the colors we see are
predetermined by what our culture prepares us to see. This example used to
support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was objectively tested in the 1960's.
That research indicated that they went too far. All normal humans share similar
sense perceptions of color despite differences in color terminology from one
language to another. The physiology of our eyes is essentially the same. People
all over the world can see subtle gradations of color and can comprehend other
ways of dividing up the spectrum of visible light. However, as a society's
economy and technology increase in complexity, the number of color terms
usually also increases. That is to say, the spectrum of visible light gets
subdivided into more categories. As the environment changes, culture and
language typically respond by creating new terminology to describe it.

NOTE: In 1976 Paul Kay, a University of California, Berkeley linguistics

professor, led a team of researchers in collecting color terms used by 110
different languages around the world. Reexamining these data in 2006, Delwin
Lindsey and Angela Brown of Ohio State University, Columbus discovered that
most languages in this study do not make a distinction between green and blue.
Further, the closer the homeland of a language group is to the equator the less
likely they are to distinguish between green and blue. Lindsey suggests as a
possible explanation that people in intensely sunny environments, such as open
country near the equator, have had their ability to see color altered due to the
yellowing of the eye lens caused by excessive ultraviolet radiation.

It is now clear that the terminology used by a culture

primarily reflects that culture's interests and
concerns. For instance, Indians in Canada's
Northwest Territories typically have at least 13 terms
for different types and conditions of snow, while most
non-skiing native Southern Californians use only 2
terms--ice and snow. That does not mean that the
English language only has 2 terms. Quite the
contrary, there are many more English words that
refer to different states of frozen water, such as blizzard, dusting, flurry, frost,
hail, hardpack, powder, sleet, slush, and snowflake. The point is that these
terms are rarely if ever used by people living in tropical or subtropical regions
because they rarely encounter frozen water in any form other than ice cubes.
The distinctions between different snow conditions are not relevant to everyday
life and children may not even have the words explained to them. However,
people in these warmer regions make fine distinctions about other phenomena
that are important to them. For instance, coastal Southern Californians often
have dozens of surfing related words that would likely be unknown to most
Indians in the Northwest Territories or to people living in Britain for that matter.

The number of terms related to a particular topic also may be greater or smaller
depending on such social factors as gender. For example, North American
women generally make far more color distinctions than do men. This may be
largely due to the fact that subtle color differences are important factors in
women's clothing and makeup. Parents and peers usually encourage and train
girls early to be knowledgeable about these distinctions.

Test your color term knowledge.

What color is the blouse?

Click the button to see

if you are correct.

The cultural environment that people grow up in can

have surprising effects on how they interpret the world
around them. This became apparent during a
Washington D.C. murder trial in 2002. A deaf man was
convicted of stabbing to death two of his classmates at
Gallaudet University. At his trial, the defendant said that
he was told to do it by mysterious black-gloved hands.
His delusions did not come in the form of spoken
language. He was told to commit these brutal murders through sign language--
his mode of communication. Another example is provided by Guugu Timithirr
language speakers of the Cape York Peninsula in northeastern Australia. This
group of Aborigines do not have words for left, right, front, or back. They use
absolute rather than relative directions. When they refer to people or objects in
their environment, they use compass directions. They would say "I am standing
southwest of my sister" rather than "I am standing to the left of my sister." Critics
of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would point out that the Aborigines who speak this
language also usually learn English and can use left, right, front, and back just as
we do. However, if they do not learn English during early childhood, they have
difficulty in orienting themselves relatively and absolute orientation makes much
more sense to them.

Ethnoscience
Anthropologists have found that learning about how people categorize things in
their environment provides important insights into the interests, concerns, and
values of their culture. Field workers involved in this type of research refer to it
as ethnoscience . These ethnoscientists have made a useful distinction in
regards to ways of describing categories of reality. Visitors to another society
can bring their own culture's categories and interpret everything in those terms.
However, there will be little understanding of the minds of the people in the
society being visited. In contrast, the visitors can suspend their own culture's
perspective and learn the categories of reality in the new society. By doing this,
they gain a much more profound understanding of the other culture.
Ethnoscientists define these two different approaches as being etic and emic
. Etic categories involve a classification according to some external system
of analysis brought in by the visitor. This is the approach of biology in using the
Linnaean classification system to define new species. It assumes that ultimately,
there is an objective reality and that is more important than cultural perceptions
of it. In contrast, emic categories involve a classification according to the way in
which members of a society classify their own world. It may tell us little about the
objective reality but it is very insightful in understanding how other people
perceive that reality through the filter of their language and culture.

Language and Culture

There are many ways in which the phenomena of language and culture are intimately
related. Both phenomena are unique to humans and have therefore been the subject of a
great deal of anthropological, sociological, and even memetic study. Language, of course,
is determined by culture, though the extent to which this is true is now under debate. The
converse is also true to some degree: culture is determined by language - or rather, by the
replicators that created both, memes.

Language as Determined by Culture

Early anthropologists, following the theory that words determine thought, believed that
language and its structure were entirely dependent on the cultural context in which they
existed. This was a logical extension of what is termed the Standard Social Science
Model, which views the human mind as an indefinitely malleable structure capable of
absorbing any sort of culture without constraints from genetic or neurological factors.

In this vein, anthropologist Verne Ray conducted a study in the 1950's, giving color
samples to different American Indian tribes and asking them to give the names of the
colors. He concluded that the spectrum we see as "green", "yellow", etc. was an entirely
arbitrary division, and each culture divided the spectrum separately. According to this
hypothesis, the divisions seen between colors are a consequence of the language we
learn, and do not correspond to divisions in the natural world. A similar hypothesis is
upheld in the extremely popular meme of Eskimo words for snow - common stories vary
from fifty to upwards of two hundred.

Extreme cultural relativism of this type has now been clearly refuted. Eskimos use at
most twelve different words for snow, which is not many more than English speakers and
should be expected since they exist in a cold climate. The color-relativity hypothesis has
now been completely debunked by more careful, thorough, and systematic studies which
show a remarkable similarity between the ways in which different cultures divide the
spectrum.

Of course, there are ways in which culture really does determine language, or at least
certain facets thereof. Obviously, the ancient Romans did not have words for radios,
televisions, or computers because these items were simply not part of their cultural
context. In the same vein, uncivilized tribes living in Europe in the time of the Romans
did not have words for tribunes, praetors, or any other trapping of Roman government
because Roman law was not part of their culture.

Our culture does, sometimes, restrict what we can think about efficiently in our own
language. For example, some languages have only three color terms equivalent to black,
white, and red; a native speaker of this language would have a difficult time expressing
the concept of "purple" efficiently. Some languages are also more expressive about
certain topics. For example, it is commonly acknowledged that Yiddish is a linguistic
champion, with an amazing number of words referring to the simpleminded. (The
Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, p.260.)

Culture and Language - United by Memes

According to the memetic theorist Susan Blackmore, language developed as a result of
memetic evolution and is an example of memes providing a selection pressure on genes
themselves. (For more on Blackmore's theory visit The Evolution of Language.) The
definition of a culture in memetic theory is an aggregate of many different meme sets or
memeplexes shared by the majority of a population. Using memetic reasoning, it can be
seen that language - itself created by memes and for memes - is the principal medium
used for spreading memes from one person to another.

As Blackmore states in The Meme Machine, memes were born when humans began to
imitate each other. According to her theory, this event preceded - indeed, had to precede -
the development of language. When imitation became widespread, producing selection
pressure on genes for successful imitation, memes began to exploit verbalizations for
better and more frequent transmission. The end result of this complex process was
language, and the anatomical alterations needed for its successful use.

Language, created by memes as a mechanism for ensuring better memetic propagation,

has certainly been a success. Today, the vast majority of memes are transmitted via
language, through direct speech, written communication, radio or television, and the
internet. Relatively few memes are transmitted in a non-linguistic way, and those that are
have very specific, localized purposes, such as artwork and photography. Even these
media, though nonlinguistic in themselves, assume language and very rarely appear
without some sort of linguistic commentary. This might take the form of a critical
analysis of an artwork, a caption for a photograph, a voice-over for a video, etc.

Language as Part of Culture

For many people, language is not just the medium of culture but also is a part of culture.
It is quite common for immigrants to a new country to retain their old customs and to
speak their first language amid fellow immigrants, even if all present are comfortable in
their new language. This occurs because the immigrants are eager to preserve their own
heritage, which includes not only customs and traditions but also language. This is also
seen in many Jewish communities, especially in older members: Yiddish is commonly
spoken because it is seen as a part of Jewish culture.

Linguistic differences are also often seen as the mark of another culture, and they very
commonly create divisiveness among neighboring peoples or even among different
groups of the same nation. A good example of this is in Canada, where French-speaking
natives of Quebec clash with the English-speaking majority. This sort of conflict is also
common in areas with a great deal of tribal warfare. It is even becoming an issue in
America as speakers of standard American English - mainly whites and educated
minorities - observe the growing number of speakers of black English vernacular.
Debates are common over whether it is proper to use "Ebonics" in schools, while its
speakers continue to assert that the dialect is a fundamental part of the "black culture".

Looking Further: Links and References

Sociolinguistics
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v•d•e

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including
cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of
language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the
focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's
focus is on the language's effect on the society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a
considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to Linguistic
Anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned
recently.[1]

It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social
variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how
creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or
socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect),
language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics
studies.

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and
Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s,
but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the social
motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model
of the late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas
Callan Hodson in the title of a 1939 paper.[2] Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in
the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil
Bernstein in the UK.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Applications of sociolinguistics
• 2 Traditional sociolinguistic interview
• 3 Fundamental concepts in sociolinguistics
o 3.1 Speech community
o 3.2 High prestige and low prestige varieties
o 3.3 Social network
o 3.4 Internal vs. external language
• 4 Differences according to class
o 4.1 Class aspiration
o 4.2 Social language codes
 4.2.1 Restricted code
 4.2.2 Elaborated code
o 4.3 Deviation from standard language varieties
o 4.4 Covert prestige
• 5 Sociolinguistic variables
• 6 See also
• 7 References
• 8 Further reading

• 9 External links
[edit] Applications of sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Areas of study

Accent · Dialect
Discourse analysis
Language varieties
Linguistic description
Pragmatics
Variation

Related fields

Applied linguistics
Historical linguistics
Linguistic anthropology
Sociocultural linguistics
Sociology of language

Key concepts

Code-switching · Diglossia
Language change
Language ideology
Language planning
Multilingualism
Prestige

People

Sociolinguists
 Category:Sociolinguistics
Portal:Linguistics

v•d•e

For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that a
particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or
professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary,
and other aspects of this sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for a
regional dialect.

The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining

language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of
different varieties of language in different social situations.

William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is

especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and change,
[3]
making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline.

[edit] Traditional sociolinguistic interview

Sociolinguistic interviews are an integral part of collecting data for sociolinguistic
studies. There is an interviewer, who is conducting the study, and a subject, or informant,
who is the interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a specific linguistic form and how it is
used in the dialect of the subject, a variety of methods are used to elicit certain registers
of speech. There are five different styles, ranging from formal to casual. The most formal
style would be elicited by having the subject read a list of minimal pairs (MP). Minimal
pairs are pairs of words that differ in only one phoneme, such as cat and bat. Having the
subject read a word list (WL) will elicit a formal register, but generally not as formal as
MP. The reading passage (RP) style is next down on the formal register, and the
interview style (IS) is when an interviewer can finally get into eliciting a more casual
speech from the subject. During the IS the interviewer can converse with the subject and
try to draw out of him an even more casual sort of speech by asking him to recall
childhood memories or maybe a near death experience, in which case the subject will get
deeply involved with the story since strong emotions are often attached to these
memories. Of course, the most sought after type of speech is the casual style (CS). This
type of speech is difficult if not impossible to elicit because of the Observer's Paradox.
The closest one might come to CS in an interview is when the subject is interrupted by a
close friend or family member, or perhaps must answer the phone. CS is used in a
completely unmonitored environment where the subject feels most comfortable and will
use their natural vernacular without overtly thinking about it.

[edit] Fundamental concepts in sociolinguistics

While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few fundamental concepts
on which many sociolinguistic inquiries depend.

[edit] Speech community

Main article: Speech community

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete

group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among
themselves.

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct

social groups like high school students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit groups like
families and friends. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or jargon
to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.

[edit] High prestige and low prestige varieties

Main article: Prestige (sociolinguistics)

Crucial to sociolinguistic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech habits are
assigned a positive or a negative value which is then applied to the speaker. This can
operate on many levels. It can be realised on the level of the individual sound/phoneme,
as Labov discovered in investigating pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/ in the North-
Eastern USA, or on the macro scale of language choice, as realised in the various
diglossias that exist throughout the world, where Swiss-German/High German is perhaps
most well known. An important implication of sociolinguistic theory is that speakers
'choose' a variety when making a speech act, whether consciously or subconsciously.

[edit] Social network

Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the social
networks in which language is embedded. A social network is another way of describing
a particular speech community in terms of relations between individual members in a
community. A network could be loose or tight depending on how members interact with
each other.[4] For instance, an office or factory may be considered a tight community
because all members interact with each other. A large course with 100+ students be a
looser community because students may only interact with the instructor and maybe 1-2
other students. A multiplex community is one in which members have multiple
relationships with each other.[4] For instance, in some neighborhoods, members may live
on the same street, work for the same employer and even intermarry.

The looseness or tightness of a social network may affect speech patterns adopted by a
speaker. For instance, Sylvie Dubois and Barbara Horvath found that speakers in one
Cajun Louisiana community were more likely to pronounce English "th" [θ] as [t] (or [ð]
as [d]) if they participated in a relatively dense social network (i.e. had strong local ties
and interacted with many other speakers in the community), and less likely if their
networks were looser (i.e. fewer local ties).[5]

A social network may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but also to the inter-
personal level of neighborhoods or a single family. Recently, social networks have been
formed by the Internet, through chat rooms, MySpace groups, organizations, and online
dating services.

[edit] Internal vs. external language

In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language (internal language)

and E-language (external language). In this context, internal language applies to the study
of syntax and semantics in language on the abstract level; as mentally represented
knowledge in a native speaker. External language applies to language in social contexts,
i.e. behavioral habits shared by a community. Internal language analyses operate on the
assumption that all native speakers of a language are quite homogeneous in how they
process and perceive language.[citation needed] External language fields, such as
sociolinguistics, attempt to explain why this is in fact not the case. Many sociolinguists
reject the distinction between I- and E-language on the grounds that it is based on a
mentalist view of language. On this view, grammar is first and foremost an interactional
(social) phenomenon (e.g. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff, Sandra Thompson).

[edit] Differences according to class

Sociolinguistics as a field distinct from dialectology was pioneered through the study of
language variation in urban areas. Whereas dialectology studies the geographic
distribution of language variation, sociolinguistics focuses on other sources of variation,
among them class. Class and occupation are among the most important linguistic markers
found in society. One of the fundamental findings of sociolinguistics, which has been
hard to disprove, is that class and language variety are related. Members of the working
class tend to speak less standard language, while the lower, middle, and upper middle
class will in turn speak closer to the standard. However, the upper class, even members of
the upper middle class, may often speak 'less' standard than the middle class. This is
because not only class, but class aspirations, are important.

[edit] Class aspiration

Studies, such as those by William Labov in the 1960s, have shown that social aspirations
influence speech patterns. This is also true of class aspirations. In the process of wishing
to be associated with a certain class (usually the upper class and upper middle class)
people who are moving in that direction socio-economically will adjust their speech
patterns to sound like them. However, not being native upper class speakers, they often
hypercorrect, which involves overcorrecting their speech to the point of introducing new
errors. The same is true for individuals moving down in socio-economic status.
[edit] Social language codes

Basil Bernstein, a well-known British socio-linguist, devised in his book, 'Elaborated and
restricted codes: their social origins and some consequences,' a social code system which
he used to classify the various speech patterns for different social classes. He claimed that
members of the middle class have ways of organizing their speech which are
fundamentally very different from the ways adopted by the working class.

[edit] Restricted code

In Basil Bernstein's theory, the restricted code was an example of the speech patterns
used by the working-class. He stated that this type of code allows strong bonds between
group members, who tend to behave largely on the basis of distinctions such as 'male',
'female', 'older', and 'younger'. This social group also uses language in a way which
brings unity between people, and members often do not need to be explicit about
meaning, as their shared knowledge and common understanding often bring them
together in a way which other social language groups do not experience. The difference
with the restricted code is the emphasis on 'we' as a social group, which fosters greater
solidarity than an emphasis on 'I'.

[edit] Elaborated code

Basil Bernstein also studied what he named the 'elaborated code' explaining that in this
type of speech pattern the middle and upper classes use this language style to gain access
to education and career advancement. Bonds within this social group are not as well
defined and people achieve their social identity largely on the basis of individual
disposition and temperament. There is no obvious division of tasks according to sex or
age and generally, within this social formation members negotiate and achieve their roles,
rather than have them there ready-made in advance. Due to the lack of solidarity the
elaborated social language code requires individual intentions and viewpoints to be made
explicit as the 'I' has a greater emphasis with this social group than the working class.

[edit] Deviation from standard language varieties

A diagram showing variation in the English language by region (the bottom axis) and by
social class (the side axis). The higher the social class, the less variation.

The existence of differences in language between social classes can be illustrated by the
following table:

Bristolian Dialect (lower class) ... Standard English (higher class)

I ain't done nothing ... I haven't done anything
I done it yesterday ... I did it yesterday
It weren't me that done it ... I didn't do it

Any native speaker of English would immediately be able to guess that speaker 1 was
likely of a different social class than speaker 2, namely from a lower social class,
probably from a working class pedigree. The differences in grammar between the two
examples of speech is referred to as differences between social class dialects or
sociolects.

It is also notable that, at least in England and Australia, the closer to standard English a
dialect gets, the less the lexicon varies by region, and vice-versa.

[edit] Covert prestige

Main article: Prestige (sociolinguistics)

It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language. However, in

certain groups, such as traditional working class neighborhoods, standard language may
be considered undesirable in many contexts. This is because the working class dialect is a
powerful in-group marker, and especially for non-mobile individuals, the use of non-
standard varieties (even exaggeratedly so) expresses neighborhood pride and group and
class solidarity. There will thus be a considerable difference in use of non-standard
varieties when going to the pub or having a neighborhood barbecue (high), and going to
the bank (lower) for the same individual.

[edit] Sociolinguistic variables

Main articles: Variation (linguistics), Dialectology, and Language and gender

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and interview
them, assessing the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables.

A commonly studied source of variation is regional dialects. Dialectology studies

variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated
features. Sociolinguists concerned with grammatical and phonological features that
correspond to regional areas are often called dialectologists.

There are several different types of age-based variation one may see within a population.
They are: vernacular of a subgroup with membership typically characterized by a specific
age range, age-graded variation, and indications of linguistic change in progress.

Variation may also be associated with gender. Men and women, on average, tend to use
slightly different language styles. These differences tend to be quantitative rather than
qualitative. That is, to say that women use a particular speaking style more than men do is
akin to saying that men are taller than women (i.e., men are on average taller than
women, but some women are taller than some men).
Further information: Complimentary language and gender

SOCIOLINGUISTICS
This introduction to some exciting aspects in the field of social linguistics is
designed to encourage you to read further. There are many fascinating and odd
phenomena that occur in the social aspects of language.

WHAT IS SOCIOLINGUISTICS?
Sociolinguistics is a term including the aspects of linguistics applied toward the
connections between language and society, and the way we use it in different social
situations. It ranges from the study of the wide variety of dialects across a given
region down to the analysis between the way men and women speak to one another.
Sociolinguistics often shows us the humorous realities of human speech and how a
dialect of a given language can often describe the age, sex, and social class of the
speaker; it codes the social function of a language.

Social Factors

INTRODUCTION
When two people speak with one another, there is always more going on
than just conveying a message. The language used by the participants is always
influenced by a number of social factors which define the relationship between
the participants. Consider, for example, a professor making a simple request of
a student to close a classroom door to shut off the noise from the corridor.
There are a number of ways this request can be made:

a. Politely, in a moderate tone "Could you please close the door?"

b. In a confused manner while shaking his/her head "Why aren't you
shutting the door?"
c. Shouting and pointing, "SHUT THE DOOR!"

The most appropriate utterance for the situation would be a. The most
inappropriate would be c. This statement humiliates the student, and provides
no effort by the professor to respect him/her. Utterance b is awkward because it
implies that the teacher automatically assumes that the student should know
better than to leave the door open when there is noise in the hallway. The
inappropriateness is a social decision tied to the social factors which shape the
relationship between speaker ( the professor), and the listener (the student).

When choosing an appropriate utterance for the situation, there are factors
that you must consider in order to effectively convey the message to the other
participant.

1. Participants- how well do they know each other?

2. Social setting- formal or informal
3. Who is talking- status relationship/social roles ( student vs. professor)
4. Aim or purpose of conversation
5. Topic

Do you notice that there is a difference in the way you speak to your
friends and the way you speak to your relatives, teachers, or others of
professional status?

When telling your friend that you like his/her shirt, you say:
"Hey, cool shirt, I like that!"
When telling the President of the company your parents work for that
you like his/her shirt, you say:
"You look very nice today, I really like that shirt."
This is called choosing your variety or code. This can also be seen on a
larger scale, diglossia, where multilingual nations include a variety of accents,
language styles, dialects and languages. Each of these factors is a reflection of
the region and socio-economics background from which you come from. In
monolingual societies, the region and socio-economic factors are determined
by dialect and language style.

It is not uncommon in our nation to see that languages other than English
are spoken inside the home with friends and family. However when these
bilingual or even trilingual families interact socially outside of their home, they
will communicate in English. Even church services may use a variation of the
language, one that you would only hear in side the church or in school. An
example of the difference in the use of a language can be seen in the following
example from Janet Holmes, "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics," of the two
main languages used in Paraguay; Spanish and Guarani:

Domain Addressee Setting Topic Language

Family Parent Home Planning a party Guarani
Friendship Friend Cafe Humorous ancedote Guarani
Choosing the Sunday
Religion Priest Church Spanish
liturgy
Education Teacher Primary Telling a story Guarani
Education Lecturer University Solving math problem Spanish
Administration Official Office Getting an important Spanish
 license

Diglossia

Diglossia: In a bilingual community, in which two languages or dialects are

used differently according to different social situations.

Janet Holmes defines diglossia as having three crucial features:

1. In the same language, used in the same community, there are two
distinct varieties. One is regarded as high (H) and the other low (L).
2. Each is used for distinct functions.
3. No one uses the high (H) in everyday conversation.

In the following example it is easy to tell which variety you will use given the
social situations:

• Telling a joke
• Interviewing for a job
• Giving a speech for a charity event
• Giving a speech for a friend for his/her birthday
• Church

• Cafeteria

PIDGINS AND CREOLES

INTRODUCTION
Can you guess what language this is?

These lines are taken from a famous comic strip in Papua New Guinea:
"Sapos yu kaikai planti pinat, bai yu kamap strong olsem phantom."
"Fantom, yu pren tru bilong mi. Inap yu ken helpim mi nau?"
"Fantom, em i go we?"

Translation:

'If you eat plenty of peanuts, you will come up strong like the phantom.'
'Phantom, you are a true friend of mine. Are you able to help me now?'
1Where did he go?'
 A simplified language derived from two or more languages is called a
pidgin. It is a contact language developed and used by people who do not share
a common language in a given geographical area. It is used in a limited way
and the structure is very simplistic. Since they serve a single simplistic purpose,
they usually die out. However, if the pidgin is used long enough, it begins to
evolve into a more rich language with a more complex structure and richer
vocabulary. Once the pidgin has evolved and has acquired native speakers ( the
children learn the pidgin as their first language), it is then called a Creole. An
example of this is the Creole above from Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin, which
has become a National language.

Reasons for the development of Pidgins

In the nineteenth century, when slaves from Africa were brought over to
North America to work on the plantations, they were separated from the people
of their community and mixed with people of various other communities,
therefore they were unable to communicate with each other. The strategy
behind this was so they couldn't come up with a plot to escape back to their
land. Therefore, in order to finally communicate with their peers on the
plantations, and with their bosses, they needed to form a language in which
they could communicate. Pidgins also arose because of colonization. Prominent
languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Dutch were the
languages of the coloni zers. They traveled, and set up ports in coastal towns
where shipping and trading routes were accessible.

There is always a dominant language which contributes most of the

vocabulary of the pidgin, this is called the superstrate language. The superstrate
language from the Papua New Guinea Creole example above is English. The
other minority languages that contribute to the pidgin are called the substrate
languages.

In the United States, there is a very well known Creole, Louisiana Creole,
which is derived from French and African Languages. You most likely have
heard of "Cajun" which is a developed dialect of this Creole.

Can you guess what major language (the superstrate) contributed to the
vocabulary in each of these Creoles? This table is taken from Janet Holmes, "
An Introduction to Sociolinguistics":

a. mo pe aste sa banan I am buying the banana

b. de bin alde luk dat big tri they always looked for a big tree
c. a waka go a wosu he walked home
d. olmaan i kas-im chek the old man is cashing a check
e. li pote sa bay mo he brought that for me
f. ja fruher wir bleiben Yes at first we remained
 g. dis smol swain i bin go fo maket this little pig went to market

POLITENESS
In everyday conversation, there are ways to go about getting the things we
want. When we are with a group of friends, we can say to them, "Go get me that
plate!", or "Shut-up!" However, when we are surrounded by a group of adults at a
formal function, in which our parents are attending, we must say, "Could you please
pass me that plate, if you don't mind?" and "I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but I
am not able to hear the speaker in the front of the room." I different social
situations, we are obligated to adjust our use of words to fit the occasion. It would
seem socially unacceptable if the phrases above were reversed.

According to Brown and Levinson, politeness strategies are developed in order

to save the hearers' "face." Face refers to the respect that an individual has for him
or herself, and maintaining that "self-esteem" in public or in private situations.
Usually you try to avoid embarrassing the other person, or making them feel
uncomfortable. Face Threatening Acts (FTA's) are acts that infringe on the hearers'
need to maintain his/her self esteem, and be respected. Politeness strategies are
developed for the main purpose of dealing with these FTA's. What would you do if
you saw a cup of pens on your teacher's desk, and you wanted to use one, would you

a. say, "Ooh, I want to use one of those!"

b. say, "So, is it O.K. if I use one of those pens?"
c. say, "I'm sorry to bother you but, I just wanted to ask you if I could use one
of those pens?"
d. Indirectly say, "Hmm, I sure could use a blue pen right now."

There are four types of politeness strategies, described by Brown and Levinson,
that sum up human "politeness" behavior: Bald On Record, Negative Politeness,
Positive Politeness, and Off-Record-indirect strategy.

If you answered A, you used what is called the Bald On-Record strategy which
provides no effort to minimize threats to your teachers' "face."

If you answered B, you used the Positive Politeness strategy. In this situation you
recognize that your teacher has a desire to be respected. It also confirms that the
relationship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity.

If you answered C, you used the Negative Politeness strategy which similar to
Positive Politeness in that you recognize that they want to be respected however,
you also assume that you are in some way imposing on them. Some other examples
would be to say, "I don't want to bother you but..." or "I was wondering if ..."
If you answered D, you used Off-Record indirect strategies. The main purpose is to
take some of the pressure off of you. You are trying not to directly impose by asking
for a pen. Instead you would rather it be offered to you once the teacher realizes you
need one, and you are looking to find one. A great example of this strategy is
somethin g that almost everyone has done or will do when you have, on purpose,
decided not to return someone's phone call, therefore you say, " I tried to call a
hundred times, but there was never any answer."

Politeness and Gender

Are Women More Polite Than Men?

Politeness is defined by the concern for the feelings of others.

From Nancy Bonvillain's "Language, Culture, and Communication" she notes

that, "women typically use more polite speech than do men, characterized by a high
frequency of honorific (showing respect for the person to whom you are talking to,
formal stylistic markers), and softening devices such as hedges and questions."

Sociolinguists try to explain why there is a greater frequency of the use of polite
speech from women than from men. In our society it is socially acceptable for a man
to be forward and direct his assertiveness to control the actions of others. However,
society has devalued these speech patterns when it is utilized by women. From
historical recurrence, it has appeared that women have had a secondary role in
society relative to that of the male. Therefore, it has been (historically) expected
from a women to "act like a lady" and "respect those around you." It reflects the role
of the inferior status being expected to respect the superior. In Frank and Anshen's
"Language and the Sexes", they note that boys, "are permitted, even encouraged, to
talk rough, cultivate a deep "masculine" voice and, if they violate the norms of
correct usage or of polite speech, well "boys will be boys," although, peculiarly, it is
much less common that "girls will be girls" Fortunately, these roles are becoming
more of a stereotype and less of a reality. However, the trend of expected polite
speech from the female continues to remain. This is a prime example of how society
plays an important part on the social function of the language.

Honorifics: linguistic markers that signal respect to the person you are speaking
to:

"Hey ma, fix my jacket"

Mom, could you please do me a favor, and fix my jacket?"
In Japanese, according to Masa-aki Yamanashi, the appropriate choice of
honorifics is based on complex rules evaluating addressee, referent, and entities or
activities associated with either. Example taken from Nancy Bonvillain's
"Language, Culture, and Communication."
1. Without Honorific.
yamada ga musuko to syokuzi o tanosinda
yamada son dinner enjoyed
"Yamada enjoyed dinner with his son."

2. With Honorific.

yamada-san ga musuko-san to o-syokuzi o tanosim-are-ta

yamada-HON son-HON HON-dinner enjoyed-HON
"Yamada enjoyed dinner with his son."

Hedges: "loosely speaking", having a sense of "fuzziness" they take away

assertiveness in your statements, soften the impact of your words or phrases such as
" I was sort-of-wondering," "maybe if....," "I think that...."

"HANK is SO MEAN!"
vs.
" I sort-of-think that Hank is a bit of a mean person."

More Gender Speech Issues

Who Talks More, Men or Women?

A common cultural stereotype describes women as being talkative, always

speaking and expressing their feelings. Well, this is probably true, however, do
women do it more than men? No! In fact an experiment designed to measure the
amount of speech produced suggested that men are more prone to use up more
talking time than women. An experiment b y Marjorie Swacker entailed using three
pictures by a fifteenth century Flemish artist, Albrecht Durer which were presented
to men and women separately. They were told to take as much time as they wanted
to describe the pictures. The average time for males: 13.0 minutes, and the average
time for women 3.17 minutes.

Why is this?
Sociolinguists try to make the connection between our society and our language
in a way that suggests that women talk less because it has not always been as
culturally acceptable as it has been for men. Men have tended to take on a more
dominant role not only in the household, but in the business world. This ever-
changing concept is becoming le ss applicable in our society, however, the trend is
still prominent in some societies across the world. It is more acceptable for a man to
be talkative, carry on long conversation, or a give a long wordy speech, however it
is less acceptable for a women to do so. It has been more of a historical trend for
men have more rights to talk. However , it is common for men to be more silent in
situations that require them to express emotion. Since childhood, they have been
told to "keep their cool" and "remain calm, be a man."

Do Men and Women Really Speak Differently?

Can you tell who, most likely, is speaking?

"Wow what a beautiful home!"
"That outfit looks lovely on you!"
"Nice coat."
"Where can I find a pair of shoes like that, I like them."
"This is a super cool shirt, I love it."
"This shirt is cool."
Sometimes comment like these may be extremely stereotypical, however it is
easy for any one to identify who the speaker is. In English we laugh at these
utterances, however in some languages there are gender-exclusive speech patterns
for men and women respectively. It is not uncommon to see these speech patterns
cross-culturally to linguistically the gender of the speaker. Edward Sapir
documented such occurrences in Yana, an American Indian language, where there
are distinct words that are used for men and women respectively.

Example taken from Janet Holmes, "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics"

Women Men

ba ba-na "dear"
yaa yaa-na "person"
Sapir found that the male form of speech is used by men when talking to other
men. Female speech is used by women talking to other women or men, or by men
talking to women. Therefore, there is an exclusive speech pattern for men speaking
to men.

There are also some examples of this in Japanese.

Example taken from Nancy Bonvillain's, "Language, Culture, and Communication"

Women Men

ohiya mizu "water"

onaka hara "stomach"
oisii umai "delicious"
taberu kuu "eat"
Speech community
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations
regarding the use of language. [1] Speech communities can be members of a profession
with a specialized jargon, distinct social groups like high school students or hip hop fans
(see also African American Vernacular English), or even tight-knit groups like families
and friends. In addition, online and other mediated communities, such as many internet
forums, often constitute speech communities. Members of speech communities will often
develop slang or jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Definition
• 2 History of the concept
• 3 Language Variation

• 4 See also

[edit] Definition
Exactly how to define speech community is debated in the literature. Definitions of
speech community tend to involve varying degrees of emphasis on the following:

• Shared community membership

• Shared linguistic communication

However, the relative importance and exact definitions of these also vary. Some would
argue that a speech community must be a 'real' community, i.e. a group of people living
in the same location (such as a city or a neighborhood), while more recent thinking
proposes that all people are indeed part of several communities (through home location,
occupation, gender, class, religious belonging, and more), and that they are thus also part
of simultaneous speech communities.

Similarly, what shared linguistic communication entails is also a variable concept. Some
would argue that a shared first language, even dialect, is necessary, while for others the
ability to communicate and interact (even across language barriers) is sufficient.

The underlying concern in both of these is that members of the same speech community
should share linguistic norms. That is, they share understanding, values and attitudes
about language varieties present in their community. While the exact definition of speech
community is debated, there is a broad consensus that the concept is immensely useful, if
not crucial, for the study of language variation and change.

A person can (and almost always does) belong to more than one speech community. For
example, a gay Jewish waiter would likely speak and be spoken to differently when
interacting with gay peers, Jewish peers, or his co-workers. If he found himself in a
situation with a variety of in-group and/or out-group peers, he would likely modify his
speech to appeal to speakers of all the speech communities represented at that moment.

(A variation on this concept is code-switching, which is usually observed among speakers

of two or more languages who switch between them based on the content or pragmatics
of their conversation.)

[edit] History of the concept

The adoption of the concept speech community as a focus of linguistic analysis emerged
in the 1960s. This was due to the pioneering work by William Labov, whose studies of
language variation in New York City and Martha's Vineyard laid the groundwork for
sociolinguistics as a social science. His studies showed that not only were class and
profession clearly related to language variation within a speech community (e.g. Martha's
Vineyard), but that socio-economic aspirations and mobility were also of great
importance.

Prior to Labov's studies, the closest linguistic field was dialectology, which studies
linguistic variation between different dialects. The primary application of dialectology is
in rural communities with little physical mobility. Thus, there was no framework for
describing language variation in cities until the emergence of sociolinguistics and the
concept of speech community, which applies to both rural and urban communities.

Since the 1960s a number of studies have been performed that have furthered our
knowledge about how speech communities work and extended its use. Notable
sociolinguists who have worked on speech communities include William Labov, John J.
Gumperz, Lesley Milroy, Robin Lakoff, and Penelope Eckert.

[edit] Language Variation

The notion of speech community is most generally used as a tool to define a unit of
analysis within which to analyse language variation and change. Stylistic features differ
among speech communities based on factors such as the group's socioeconomic status,
common interests and the level of formality expected within the group and by its larger
society.

In Western culture, for example, employees at a law office would likely use more formal
language than a group of teenage skateboarders because most Westerners expect more
formality and professionalism from practitioners of law than from an informal circle of
adolescent friends. This special use of language by certain professions for particular
activities is known in linguistics as register; in some analyses, the group of speakers of a
register is known as a discourse community, while the phrase "speech community" is
reserved for varieties of a language or dialect that speakers inherit by birth or adoption.

[edit] See also

Speech Communities
Every person belongs to a speech community, a group of people who speak the same language.
Estimates of the number of speech communities range from 3,000 to 7,000 or more, with the
number of speakers of a given language ranging from many millions of speakers down to a few
dozen or even fewer. The following list probably includes (in approximate descending order) all
languages spoken natively by groups of more than 100 million people: North Chinese vernacular
(Mandarin), English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi or Urdu, Portuguese, Bengali or Bangla, Russian,
French, Japanese, German, and Malay or Bahasa Indonesia. Roughly 120 languages have at
least a million speakers, and some 60% of the world's languages have 10,000 or fewer
speakers.

Many persons speak more than one language; English is the most common auxiliary language in
the world. When people learn a second language very well, they are said to be bilingual. They
may abandon their native language entirely, because they have moved from the place where it is
spoken or because of politico-economic and cultural pressure (as among Native Americans and
speakers of the Celtic languages in Europe). Such factors may lead to the disappearance of
languages. In the last several centuries, many languages have become extinct, especially in the
Americas; more than 300 were near extinction at the end of the 20th cent.

Sections in this article:

Read more: language: Speech Communities — Infoplease.com

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0859179.html#ixzz10z3J8Dqq

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less

discrete group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted
way among themselves.

P&c

A pidgin is ? a language with a reduced range of structure and use, with NO native speakers.? It
grows up among people who do not share a common language but who want to communicate
with each other.

A creole is ?a pidgin which has become the mother tongue of a community,? and therefore has
native speakers.

(Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language).