Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya

Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology

Language, Culture and Society

Alma J. Sifrim-327047775

Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf were among the first few anthropologists to bring focus to the relationship between language, thought, and culture. While neither officially wrote the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis nor supported it with empirical evidence, researchers have uncovered two important main ideas through a detailed study of their writings about linguistics.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the way people think is strongly influenced by their native language. In fact, in its most extreme interpretation, this hypothesis asserts that speakers of a certain language cannot be understood by those who speak a different native language. In other words, there can be no real communication cross-culturally. According to Kay and Kempton’s paper, What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? (Kay & Kempton, 1984), two implicit hypotheses can be interpreted.

The first is known as linguistic relativity, i.e. “structural differences between languages are paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences” (p. 66). This first hypothesis seems to be the most mild of the two indicating a link between cognition and language. Hoosain (1991) explains that linguistic relativity is when language influences our thoughts in such a way that the use of it can lead to differences in conceptualizations or thought structures. In addition Hoosain (1991) asserts that attention to language differences was focused mainly on grammatical structure and vocabulary.

The second hypothesis is called linguistic determinism. This hypothesis states that the worldview we acquire as we learn a native language is strongly affected and determined by the structure of this language. This idea further implies that cultures with more refined languages possess a more refined representation of the world (Kay & Kempton, 1984). Moreover this hypothesis posits that implicit or explicit linguistic categorizations somewhat determine nonlinguistic behaviors such as categorization, perception, memory and thought, again implying that individual’s thought processes differ across languages (Hickmann, 2000). ‬‬

Both Sapir and Whorf agreed that our language is determined by our culture, which in turn affects the way we categorize our thoughts about the world and similarly our experiences.

The relationship between language and thought has been researched for many years now. Researchers are still thoroughly examining the validity of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis today. One way in which this is being done is by exploring the relationship between native languages and how speakers of these languages tend to think about time. In other words, do speakers of different native tongues conceptualize time differently? Is this difference in thinking entirely determined by language as proposed by the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic determinism, or is it more likely that results support the hypothesis of linguist relativity?

In a study done by Boroditsky (2001), native English speakers and native Mandarin speakers were given spatial prime questions followed by questions about time. English speakers verified faster that “March comes earlier than April” after horizontal primes than after vertical primes. Knowing that English speakers think about time horizontally, this result was predicted, while the reverse was true for Mandarin speakers. Thus, native English and native Mandarin speakers were found to think differently about time. Three different experiments conducted by Boroditsky (2001) confirm that indeed one’s native language appears to significantly affect the way speakers of the language think about abstract concepts of time.

In a different study by Fuhrman et al. (2011), they conducted three experiments examining how English and Mandarin speakers represent time. Each experiment utilized a different paradigm, however all three pointed to a cross-cultural difference in temporal thinking, suggesting that Mandarin speakers think about time more vertically than English speakers. This study concluded that patterns in both language and culture could indeed prompt differences in thought, specifically in the conceptual domain of time.

        Hömke, Majid and Boroditsky (2013) examined whether the way people map time onto space using spatiotemporal metaphors, could possibly shape the temporal focus of the language user. Indeed, the findings in this study suggest that the degree to which people focus on the past may be shaped by the visibility of the past in spatiotemporal metaphors used in language. This finding more generally implies that the metaphors we use to talking about time may exert great influence on the attention we devote to thinking about the past, present or future.

        All three studies discussed above present empirical evidence that support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which claims that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. However, neither of these studies succeeded in gathering evidence that one’s language can entirely determine one’s thinking, as suggested by the hypothesis of linguistic determinism, even in abstract domains such as time. Findings supporting linguistic relativity may inadvertently be interpreted as supporting linguistic determinism; the idea that language strictly determines the thoughts of the speaker (Casasanto, 2008). Nevertheless, in the studies mentioned above it was made clear that although differences in thought were discovered in relation to the language of the speaker, one’s native language does not entirely determine one’s thinking.