Relatively speaking: do our words influence how we think?

Linguistic relativity can tell us about our perceptions of reality and the relationship
between language and the way we think
Josephine Livingstone, 2014

(Adapted extract. Published in The Guardian, 29 January 2014)

Recently, whilst waiting for a flight at the airport in Berlin, I listened to the German voice coming
over the loudspeaker. A traveller beside me turned to his companion and said: "They sound like
they're angry all the time, don't they? Speaking that language all day must do something to your
brain."

The idea that the language you speak affects the way that you think seems obvious, one of those
things you just assume. But what exactly is the relationship between what goes on in your head
and the words you use?

In his 1940 essay, Science and Linguistics, a young researcher named Benjamin-Lee Whorf
described his principle of linguistic relativity, which argues “that all observers are not led by the
same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are
similar". His research appeared to show that speakers of different kinds of language were, as a
result of those language differences, cognitively different from one another. This principle is
sometimes called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism. Put simply, Whorf believed
that the language we speak influences the way we think – so our language and worldview are
closely intertwined.

1
Whorf's hypothesis is an example of 20th-century academic thought that has prompted a great
deal of discussion. Have you ever heard stories about the people who have "no concept of time"?
Has anyone ever told you there are numerous Inuit words for snow? This is all based on the
research of Benjamin-Lee Whorf.

The time-less people were the Hopi, a Native American tribe who still live in north-eastern Arizona
in the USA. Whorf claimed that the Hopi language did not have any words for time. There was no
direct translation for the noun “time” and no grammatical constructions indicating the past or
future. Therefore, Whorf argued, the Hopi people could not conceive of time. Instead, they
experienced reality in a fundamentally different way. Whorf concluded that the way we
conceptualise the world around us is determined by the language we speak. This is known as
linguistic determinism.

Many people initially disagreed with Whorf's hypothesis. They argued that his idea that people
cannot conceive of realities for which they have no words makes no sense. How would we ever
learn anything if that were true? We aren't born with words for everything that we understand.

However, Whorf’s arguments are now widely accepted at a general level. Although it is now
understood that the Hopi do understand the concept of time, it seems that they conceptualise time
and space differently from the average European or English speaker. For example, an event that
occurs far away (at a great spatial distance) is referred to has occurring in the distant past. In
contrast, an event which is spatially closer is regarded as nearer the present time. This means that
time is understood in terms of how close or distant it is.

In emphasising cultural and linguistic relativism, Whorf emphasised the “conditioned” differences
between people. In other words, although people are all biologically the same, their cultural
environment conditions them. This influences the culture's language, which encapsulates its
identity, to the extent that different languages represented totally distinct worldviews. The Hopi
language frames the way the Hopi talk about their universe. In Whorf’s view, this is the same for
all languages and all people.

Linguistic relativity is a subject that people will always be interested in because it directly relates
to the way we process the world and communicate with each other. It is now generally accepted
that our language and culture are closely connected. Even if this connection does not determine
our cognitive categories, at the very least it seems that the language we speak will influence our
thought and decisions.