Jun

30

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

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According to German linguists and philologists from 18th century, humans communicate
distinctively because they contemplate in diverse ways, and the reason why they contemplate
divergently is that they are able to reflect the world differently through their language. From that time, the theory has become known as linguistic relativity and defined as the claim that culture, through language, affects the way in which we think, and especially our classification of the experienced world. The notion was later on examined at the beginning of 20th century by linguist Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf. The scholars studied American Indian languages and Whorf’s concept of inseperabality of language and cogitation has been recognized as the notion of Saphir-Whorf hypothesis.
The Sapir-Whorf theory states that behavior and thought are affected by language. As it was
already mentioned Sapir and Whorf concentrated on the relationship between language, thought and culture, unfortunately they did not provide written theory or supplied it with empirical evidence. However, after examining their writings concerning linguistics, scholars enountered two main postulates. The first one, known as strong version, is linguistic determinism that theorizes that spoken language controls the methods of understanding the world one lives in. The second one, a weaker version makes an assumption that language barely determines one’s thoughts about the world.
Edward Sapir based his assumptions on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s strong theory of linguistic
determinism: “man lives in the world about him principally, indeed exclusively, as language
presents it to him” (1836) and focused on this idea. In keeping with this, Sapir concluded 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 in their society” (1958: 69). One cannot accommodate oneself to reality beyond language use, because language assists in decoding particular problems while communicating or reflecting. It follows that the world is unintentionally framed by habits of community and one cannot acknowledge two languages as comparable when describing the same social reality.
As it has been examined above, Sapir concentrated on firm language to analyze the interrelation between language and thought, stating that the individual is not aware of this correlation and exposed to it without choice, whereas his student Benjamin Lee Whorf constructed the weak 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…” (1956). However, Whorf also assisted the strong version of linguistic relativity and for him the relationship between language and thought was necessity as well.
Both Sapir and Whorf admitted that culture influences our language and in consequence it
influences our thoughts about the world and our involvement in it. Nevertheless, since it has
been introduced, it has provoked much controversy in the field of linguistics, education,
psychology and anthropology. Five decades later researchers of social sciences declined the
strong version of Whorf’s theory, stating that incomparability of cultures should not be treated as reliable. It was explained that the reason why people are not able to communicate meaningfully is not because of impossibility of translation within languages, it is owing to the fact that people, do not share the same beliefs, have different values of the notions hidden behind the words and thus they have different meanings. All in all, they do not perceive and encounter the real world in the same manner. Therefore, the strong version of the hypothesis, which holds that language influences one’s way of thinking was rejected. The weak version, on the other hand, is generally accepted as it states that “there are cultural differences in the semantic associations evoked by seemingly common concepts” (Kramsch 1998: 13). According to this version people arrange experiences diversely when it comes to meaning that is supplied by formal communication.
“Thus the generic semantic meanings of the code that have established themselves over time
within a given discourse community are subject to the various and variable uses made of them in social contexts. We are, then, not prisoners of the cultural meaning offered to us by our language, but can enrich them in our pragmatic interactions with other language users” (Kramsch 1998:14). PDF


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