John Leavitt
Introduction
The term and the notion of ‘linguistic relativity’are usually associated with the names of the American linguist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who developed the ideas of Sapir’s teacher Franz Boas (1858–1942), one of the founders of North American anthropology and linguistics. For these scholars, the diversity of languages was one of the central facts about human beings and potentially, at least, had implications for con- ceptualization of natural and social situations. In the 1920s and 1930s Sapir and Whorf both proposed a ‘principle of linguistic relativity’with an explicit reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity: this amounted to maintaining that 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– just as in Einstein’s relativity the velocity and direction of the measurer him- or herself had tofigure in the determination of those of any other entity. In neither case was there a privileged fixed point or centre from which everything else could be judged.
For Boas and his students, each language constituted a system organized at several levels, each of which had its own kind of coherence. For each language, the level of sounds, of phonology, was evidently structured and obviously different from the sound organization of other languages: this is what produced the phenomenon of accent. With the level of lexicon one arrived at units of meaning, which divided the world in unique ways for each language and for its speakers, largely correlated with the speakers’way of life–if the way of life changed, then lexicon was likely to change along with it. It was at the‘higher’level of grammatical categories–e.g., tense, gender, number in Western languages, data source or shape in some others–that one found organizations of meaning and orientations towards some aspects of experience rather than others, organizations and orientations that were pervasive and relatively inaccessible to conscious manipulation. A speaker of English must, through the use of tense, specify the relationship between the time of the event spoken about and the time of speaking, and must do so hundreds of times every day;
a speaker of Aymara need only specify this relationship when it is pertinent to do so, but must specify how she knows what she’s talking about, again (at least) hundreds of times every day.
Without claiming that language determines culture or thought, the linguistic relativity principle says that such differences are real, are potentially important, and deserve to be attended to.
This kind of a principle faces immediate opposition from one well-established school of thought, and risks being identified with another. Since Aristotle, the view has been widespread in the West that all humans think in the same way, and that language merely serves to code and communicate already-formed thoughts. Such a view is basic to such philosophical monuments as Cartesian rationalism, Locke’s empiricism, and Kant’s transcendentalism; and this kind of universalism is carried on today by the dominant mode of cognitive science. If the basis of a whole discipline is that the speaker of any language is merely translating from a universal
‘mentalese’(see, for instance, Pinker, 1994), thenanyclaims of the importance of the specifics of a given language are highly troublesome.
The strategy most commonly used to overcome or avoid this issue has been to identify linguistic relativity with the other great Western view of the relationship among language, thought, and culture, which identifies these as aspects of a single national or ethnic whole, varying from people to people. This kind of view goes back to the Romantics in the early nineteenth century and remains powerful in nationalist and ethnic affirmation movements today. It holds that every language is a natural part of a unique national or cultural totality; in other words, that the human world is made up of a number of national or ethnic essences. The language one speaks, in this view, reflects–or indeed determines–one’s mode of thought, in a way that is distinct for each nation. In some of these models, one’s language in factlimitswhat it is possible to think.
The difference between such essentialism and the much more open principle of linguistic relativity should be clear. But for decades the two have been identified, especially by schools of thought that seek or assume a single universal human mode of thinking or knowing the world.
This convenient straw man can be disposed of even more easily if, unlike Boas and company, we eliminate some aspects of language–sounds, which obviously differ from language to language in ways of which speakers are only partly conscious; or grammatical structures, which oblige speakers to attend to certain aspects of reality whether these are relevant or not–leaving only isolated words to represent‘language’.
The whole combination–the claim that the wordsyour language gives you determine and limitwhat it is possible for you to think–while evidently false (or because it is evidently false) has come to be the most common definition given of‘linguistic relativity’, even by authors who are striving to be fair and balanced. In the succinct formulation of John I. Saeed in his textbook onSemantics (second edition, 2003: 40, third edition, 2009: 41), linguistic relativity is the view that‘lexicalized concepts impose restrictions on possible ways of thinking’. In fact, as is clear in the definition given above, none of the actual proponents of linguistic relativity made any such claim (on page 43 of his book (third edn.), Saeed himself notes the importance of grammatical categories, as opposed to words, for Whorf); on the contrary, no language, they insisted, puts limits on what it is possible to conceptualize–while they continued to demonstrate a seductive power of established language patterns to offer easy-to-follow mental paths. This becomes par- ticularly clear in Whorf’s distinction between least-effort‘habitual thinking’, largely guided by a received language and culture, and what it ispossible for a person to conceive, in particular by becoming familiar with languages and cultures very different from his or her own.
Here I will lay out some of the elements of linguistic relativity as presented by the Boasians.
To understand why Boas came to his formulation of this theory, this presentation will be preceded by a brief history of major Western approaches to language diversity before Boas, laying out the sources of both universalist and pluralist options. After the discussion of Boasian linguistic relativity I will give brief presentations of an alternative pluralist option contemporary with his, that of the ‘neo-Humboldtian’school of linguistics in Germany; and I will follow this with a discussion of developments since the deaths of the idea’s original proponents: the virtual
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suppression of serious consideration of language diversity in the decades of the rise and hegemony of cognitive psychology and Chomskyan linguistics, and the recent rise of interest in linguistic relativity in a number offields.
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 lineles 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.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, but finding their full formulation in the seventeenth, practitioners and theorists of three major Western European philosophical and scientific languages – French, English, and German – took distinctive tacks in facing diversity and claiming their own particular strengths, propounding three distinct linguistic ideologies.
The French tendency, which was greatly strengthened with the rise of Cartesian rationalism in the seventeenth century, was to valorize French for its relatively rigid syntax, said to be natural and to follow the order of reason, particularly as opposed to the free word order of Latin. The idea of a single‘natural’or‘direct’order of thought had come from some Hellenistic philosophers, and their model was expressed in sentences in the order subject, verb, object, with adjectives after their nouns and adverbs after verbs. As it happens, this fit closely with the baseline order of the French sentence (Scaglione, 1972: 74–6, 105–121). Already in the sixteenth century, Louis Meigret wrote that
the French style fits it (the order of nature) much better than does the Latin … (French follows) the order that nature holds to in her works, and which the usage of speech has tended to follow.
(1550 [1880]: 195–6) The English tendency was to see English as a particularly useful and simple language, or indeed (in the seventeenth century) to invent new languages that reflected the real world with even greater faithfulness. Again, already in the sixteenth century, Richard Mulcaster wrote
I do not think that anie language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater planeness, than our English tung is.
(1582; cited in Baugh and Cable, 1978: 202) Where each of these lauded their language because of its supposed superiority in terms of an external ideal, defenders of German praised it for its very distinctiveness, its particular music, the aptness of its words, and the flexibility of its word order. Again, the full development of this position would come in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but already in 1573 Laurentius Albertus would praise German for its purity and distinctiveness; the purpose of his grammar is to show ‘the abundance and marvellous variation of combining words in our language’ (cited in McLelland, 2001: 15).
All of these tendencies received their clearest expressions in the 1660s. In France, Cartesian theorists claimed the universality of French word order as a direct restatement of the natural and universal order of reason:‘la raison est de tout pays’, wrote Louis Le Laboureur (1669), arguing that everyone in the world thought like Frenchmen, and that‘inverting’languages such as Latin required an additional step in order to scramble their sentences.
In England, the Royal Society encouraged a simple and direct style, with‘so many words standing for as many things’ and no superfluous verbosity (Thomas Sprat, 1667; see Vickers 1987). But the quest for words standing directly for things went much farther in the numerous English and Scottish schemes for new languages that would directly reflect knowledge of the world of things, culminating in Bishop John Wilkins’s great ‘Real Character’(1668) in which the world was divided into categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories, each of which was figured with a distinctive line and subordinate squiggles to form a universal ideography which could also be expressed in syllables (see J. L. Borges’s essay‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’in Borges, 1952 [1968]).
These approaches to language diversityfit well, in both French and English cases, with wider philosophical tendencies: French rationalism and British empiricism and what might already be called a British proto-utilitarianist tendency. In France, in particular, the view that reason was
‘de tout pays’and that language differences were secondary also led to a distinctive theory of translation in which any text, from any period of history and showing no matter what pecu- liarities of form or content, was to be translated into standard respectable seventeenth-century French and standard French style. This transformation was often seen as an improvement on the original, giving it a balance and an elegance that it lacked. Both because of their elegance and because of the freedom they took with their originals, these translations came to be called‘les Belles Infidèles’(Zuber, 1968).
In Germany, on the other hand, there was a developing strain of the defence and admiration of German for its own characteristics, for its German-ness, rather than as an exemplar of universal reason or a handy way of handling empirical evidence. This tendency was exemplified in Schottelius’s work, again in the 1660s. Schottelius wrote that the strength of German lay in its body of roots, which
are made up of their own natural letters and not foreign ones … [and] have an appealing sound and fully express their object.
(1663, cited in Faust, 1981: 51) This appeal to the Germanness of German was developed as part of G. W. Leibniz’s philosophy of a multiple and diverse universe. Here each language has its unique part to play in the whole. In particular, Leibniz insists that thinking itself is not a pre-semiotic, already-there activity which is only externalized by language–the assumption of both French rationalists and British empiricists– but that thought and reason are themselves processes carried out through the use of signs, especially but not exclusively linguistic signs. This philosophical position carries the clear implication that differing systems of signs will have an impact on thinking itself.
The relatively clear seventeenth-century positions would be challenged in the eighteenth century, particularly in Britain and France. Debates between rationalists and progressives in France culminated in Condillac’s defence of free word order and his claim that thinking itself required the use of distinctive signs–an idea he had acquired from Leibniz’s follower Christian Wolff. Reactionaries like the self-styled Comte de Rivarol (1784) reiterated the arguments about the superiority of French rigidity – ‘la syntaxe du français est incorruptible’ – while revolutionaries proclaimed liberty in the choice of word order. The Reaction of the early
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nineteenth century brought claims (by the reactionary thinkers De Maistre and Bonald) that the Revolution itself was the predictable result of the corruption of language. Eighteenth-century Britain, for its part, saw battles between French-influenced neo-rationalists (James Harris, Monboddo) and resurgent empiricists (Horne Tooke).
In Germany, again, linguistic and cultural diversity was praised as a good in itself in the pre-Romanticism of J. G. Hamann (1730–88) and J. G. Herder (1744–1803). The attack on universalism was heightened after Herder’s teacher Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) came to maintain that all human thought has the same form. In their two metacritiques of Kant’s Critique, both Hamann and Herder claimed that forms of thought come from already-given languages and so are as diverse as the languages themselves.
This view came into its own with the German Romantics early in the nineteenth century. The Romantics fully valorized diversity and cultural and linguistic specificity. Following on Herder, they felt that the highly distinctive productions of rural, illiterate people–their stories, songs, dances, costumes–represented the true and authentic soul of each nation (Volksgeist) and as such merited devoted study. Romantic translation practice, the reverse of theBelles Infidèles, sought to capture the distinctive, even disturbing, tone of the original in order to enlarge the taste of the target readership and, in this case, German literature (Berman, 1984 [1992]). Romantic projects of national self-exploration were exemplified in the work of the brothers Jakob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), who compiled not only their collection of folktales, but also the German grammar, German dictionary, and the main collections of medieval German laws and legends, and Germanic (i.e., Scandinavian) myths. Similar projects were undertaken in most European countries and with most European ethnic groups in the nineteenth century, and continued to be carried out throughout the world as an integral part of nationalist and ethnicist movements.
The assumption in every case seems to be that of a plurality of essences: each‘national spirit’is carried by a traditional way of living that includes language, literature, but particularly rural and oral literature, traditional dress, ways of living the land, folk ecology and a distinctive landscape.
Even as one Romantic project was the valorization of one’s own language and culture, another was the vast comparative study of all languages and cultures. Perhaps the heroes of this kind of effort were the brothers Wilhelm (1767–1835) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), respectively the founders of linguistics as the comparative study of forms of language and of geography as the comparative study of modes of natural life. For Wilhelm von Humboldt
Themental individualityof a people and theshape of its language are so intimately fused with one another, that if one were given, the other would have to be completely derivable from it. Language is, as it were, the outer appearance of the spirit of a people; the language is their spirit and the spirit their language; we can never think of them sufficiently as identical.
(Humboldt, 1836 [1999]: 46)
The later nineteenth century
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 (Naturwissenschaften) and the particularist interpretative methods of what came to be called historical or spiritual sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).
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.
Practitioners of this new science, which was particularly developed in Germany, focused primarily on the Indo-European languages, with other languages serving almost as foils.
Towards the end of the century, with the rise of the Neogrammarian school, historical linguistics came to identify itself as a natural science seeking universal laws of the transformation of isolated sounds, with little interest in particular languages as systems or in the relationship of language to other aspects of life.
Even as historical linguistics, clearly the dominant school in language study throughout the century, became more and more narrowly natural–scientific, a small number of scholars (a‘Humboldtian stream’) maintained a very different kind of linguistics, one concerned with the structure of distinct languages as systems, with all the languages of the world in their diversity, and with the relationship of language structure to literary creation and other social practices.
This kind of linguistics, primarily part of the cultural rather than the natural sciences, was championed above all by Heymann Steinthal (1823–99), whose overall view would be cited as a model by Boas.
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.
Both historical linguistics and evolutionism shared models that recognized the existence of diversity but valorized it differentially. In both cases there was a single superior mode–modern European societies and ideas on the one hand, Indo-European languages on the other–which set a yardstick for measuring a range of inferior societies, modes of thought, or languages. With a fair deal of difficulty, evolutionists tried to show how languages spoken by‘primitive’people were themselves primitive. They found themselves focusing particularly on limited areas of the lexicon, such as numbers, in which modern Western languages have more terms than do the languages spoken by small-scale societies; or, for instance, the presence or absence of gestures – the less gesturing, the more civilized the people, to the point that a number of evolutionists maintained thefiction that there were people whose spoken languages were so scanty that they could not communicate at night (Tylor, 1871: 164; Morgan 1877: 37; Starr 1895: 170).
Boas, Sapir, Whorf, and their contemporaries
At the end of the nineteenth century, then, a young scholar like Boas, with an interest in the interaction of perception and reality, would have faced a number of theoretical options. At this point, both historical linguistics and evolutionist anthropology were squarely on the side of the natural sciences: thefirst limited its interest to transformations, especially laws of sound transformation most particularly within languages of the Indo-European family, considered the most advanced type of language; the latter judged all human activity as leading up to the modern West.
Boas rejected both of these positions. Born, raised, and trained in Germany, his central initial interest was in the relationship between the physical world as measured by modern science and the world as perceived by human subjects. He began his education in physics and moved by gradual degrees towards perception, then on to the collective perception of the environment, i.e., to geography. Boas passed through some of the most developed branches of German science, from physics to psychophysics to psychology and then to geography andfinally to ethnology, with what appears to have been a fairly late discovery of the implications of linguistics (on Boas’s training, see Stocking, 1968).
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