LANGUAGE

RELATIVITY,
PRECURSORS AND
TRANSFORMATION
S
Judith S. Fetalver – Master of Arts in English
Major in Language and Literature
EDWARD SAPIR (1884-1939)

 American anthropologist-linguist; a leader

in American structural linguistics

Author of Language: An Introduction to the

Study of Speech
 Born in Lauenberg, Germany.
 Pupil of Franz Boas, teacher of
Benjamin Whorf
 BENJAMIN LEE WHORF
(1897-1941)
 Although he met, and later studied with Edward
Sapir, he never took up linguistics as a
profession.
 Whorf's primary area of interest in linguistics was
the study of native American languages. He
became quite well known for his work on the
Hopi language.
 He was considered to be a captivating speaker
and did much to popularize his linguistic ideas
through popular lectures and articles written to
be accessible to lay readers.
LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
 a theory that tackles about the differences between the languages of
speaker and analyst constituted a factor that had to be taken
explicitly into account in any analysis of social and cultural life

 the diversity of languages was one of the central facts about human
beings and potentially, at least, had implications for
conceptualization of natural and social situations.
 First discussed by Sapir in 1929, the hypothesis became
popular in the 1950s following posthumous publication of
Whorf's writings on the subject.

 After vigorous attack from followers of Noam Chomsky in the

following decades, the hypothesis is now believed by most
linguists only in the weak sense that language can have some
small effect on thought.
 In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are
certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be
understood by those who live in another language.

 The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly

affected by their native languages.

 It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir

and his student Benjamin Whorf
 LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY PRINCIPLE
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language
affects the ways in which its respective speakers conceptualize their world, i.e.
their world view, or otherwise influences their cognitive processes. Popularly known
as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as
having two versions: (i) the strong version that language determines thought and that
linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version
that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic
behavior. The term "Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis" is a misnomer, as Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored anything, and never stated their ideas in terms
of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of the hypothesis
is also a later invention, as Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although
often in their writings their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or
weaker terms.
 Major Reactions to Linguistic Diversity
One of the striking things about human languages is that there are many of
them. In the West, this has generally been presented either as a curse, as in the
Tower of Babel story or Mallarmé’s line les langues imparfaites en cela que
plusieurs; or as a blessing, an enrichment of human life. While it is certainly an
oversimplification, it is still possible to see much of Western thinking about
language diversity as tending toward an opposition of two poles. The majority
view has been to see language differences as a practical problem, insignificant
compared to the universality of human thought, of human experience of the
world, or both. Explicitly against such universalism, tendencies have continued
to arise defending and indeed glorifying diversity as an inherent good, usually as
part of projects of national and ethnic self-promotion.
 Linguistic Transformation

The latter part of the nineteenth century was marked by the

rise in prestige of the natural sciences and of corresponding
universalistic ideologies of science. In Germany, as a way of
defending humanist diversity, a clear distinction was made
between the universalist law-seeking methods of the natural
sciences and the particularist interpretative methods of what
came to be called historical or spiritual sciences.
 Linguistic Transformation

The study of language throughout the century was

dominated by the discovery of the genetic relationships
among languages, particularly those of the Indo-European
language family.
But the great European intellectual development of the second half of the
nineteenth century was that of cultural evolutionism, which sought to
understand all of human history as a progress from uniform savagery and
lack of organization to a state of highly organized civilization typical of
modern Western societies. Holding that history recapitulates phylogeny,
small-scale non- Western societies, peasant beliefs and superstitions,
children, were all held to represent survivals of earlier, more primitive
stages.
 The 1990s and after
The ground began to shift in the 1990s. In 1992, John Lucy, a psychologist with training in
anthropology and linguistics, published twin volumes on linguistic relativity. In the first he re-
presented the history of ideas, cutting through decades of misrepresentation to give a far more
realistic picture of the Sapir–Whorf project than had until then been available. In particular, Lucy
insisted on the importance of testing for pervasive grammatical categories rather than merely for
vocabulary items. In the second volume, he presented his own series of experiments comparing
English- and Mayan-speaking subjects on the categories of number and animacy and finding
significant differences between the two on psychological tasks specifically involving these
categories. Lucy had found what were coming to be called ‘Whorf effects’. The two projects
offered in these books, one historical, one experimental, have continued with increasing importance
from that point on. In 1996, Penny Lee published The Whorf Theory Complex, still the major study
of what Whorf was really about; and new work continues to reread Boas and company in light of
the influences upon them and their influence on others.
Societal expectations are the main source of cultural relativity of
developmental tasks, typically reflected in age norms. This means that a
person is expected to solve a specific developmental task within a certain
period. Therefore, the individual's developmental stage can be described as
one in which he or she is able to deal with culturally set demands. Cultural
norms are also reflected in ‘early,’ ‘on time,’ and ‘late’ development in
various transition domains, as, for example, deciding on a job or preparing
for a family. Expectations of the timing in role transitions exist for the
individual as a private person (e.g., reaching emotional and economic
independence from parents, taking responsibility for further decisions) as
well as a public person (e.g., age-related norms for different civic rights).