Does language shape thought? Do the languages we speak affect how we live our lives? In a forthcoming article in Language, I revisit one of the oldest debates in the social sciences. Here's a mega-𧡠to whet your appetite!
"Language shapes reality" --> you've probably heard some version of this before. Linguists generally call this the "linguistic relativity" thesis. You may have heard it termed the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"
(Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, for whom it's named, didn't really believe this thesis in its strongest form. But they made important discoveries about human languages and how we use language.)
So what's linguistic relativity? Loosely, it holds that to some degree, the language that you speak affects how you perceive and interact with the social world. E.g., Arabic-speakers and Japanese-speakers see the world differently BECAUSE their languages differ
This is a big claim! It is not just that people differ, or that communities with different languages differ. It is that language--itself--CAUSES those differences!
Can you think of a single research area that is so equally exciting for philosophers, experimental psychologists, ethnographers, and developmental economists?
Here's an example. English has one word for second-person singular: you. French as two: tu and vous. In French, there is a formal/politeness/familiarity distinction in the words for "you" that English does not have
Linguistic relativity says this is more than just a vocab challenge for English speakers. It says that French people will be more attuned to rank, status, and hierarchy than English speakers because of the tu/vous distinction
You're thinking, "More attuned to class than English? Seems unlikely!" But counterfactually, perhaps English would be even more class-conscious if we had a tu/vous distinction as well. Can you imagine The Crown, but pronouns matter too???
Linguistic relativity has origins in European encounters with the Americas and with Africa. It developed from views about primitive peoples versus civilized peoples, and the view that primitive peoples were primitive because they spoke primitive languages
It wasn't racist in essence (linguistic heritage is not genetic heritage), but it was racist in application (guess whose languages were the primitive ones) and in its implications (one can civilize primitive peoples by giving them civilized languages)
No one really believes this racist and colonialist view anymore. But LOTS of people believe a softer version of linguistic relativity, and in fact, it is one of the most prominent areas of research in the social sciences right now
You may have heard, for example, this NPR story about how people who speak future-oriented languages save more money than people who don't npr.org
Not just an NPR story: that article was published in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the premier economics disciplinary association in the world! It's been cited almost 700 times in less than a decade. aeaweb.org
Before we get to that, though, step back. Some version of linguistic relatively is has got to be true. For a simple example, take the word for the color "blue." In English, we look at these two colors and call them both blue
But in Russian, these are two different colors: goluboy/Π³ΠΎΠ»ΡΠ±ΠΎΠΉ (light blue) and siniy/ΡΠΈΠ½ΠΈΠΉ (dark blue). You can't go wrong calling either "blue" in English, but using "siniy" to describe light blue would be like calling the sky "green"
And it turns out that Russian speakers can do certain tasks related to classifying blue colors faster than English-speakers. (this study is in PNAS, so you know it's good pnas.org)
That last bit is the linguistic relativity part: Russian-speakers go about their world a little bit differently than English-speakers: not just different words, but different competences. That's a neat finding. It tells us that our language affects our reality
But⦠well⦠disambiguating among shades of blue isn't really a socially meaningful activity. Most linguists don't think that linguistic differences like this explain too much about our everyday lives in any meaningful way
My favorite example of linguistic relativity that matters comes from speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, a language of Queensland (and source of the word "kangaroo") en.wikipedia.org
Guugu Yimithirr is probably unique among the world's languages in that it has no egocentric directions, like left/right or in front/behind. So to describe where something is, you have to reference cardinal directions like North/South
So my computer is to the South of me, and if I turn my back to it, it is still to the South of me. In English, though, we'd say in front of me and then behind me
That's a pretty substantial claim, but there's good evidence Guugu Yimithirr speakers are better at dead reckoning and solving maze puzzles than are speakers of related languages who do possess egocentric directions and who live otherwise similar lives
So, OK. What's happened in the past twenty years or so is that a lot of social scientists have embraced linguistic relativity to argue that language is a fundamental determinant of human behavior across the world
Examples? What if people who speak languages with grammatical gender in indefinite articles are more sexist than the rest of us? (Compare English "the" to German "der/die/das")
What if people with obligatory politeness distinctions in pronouns are more authoritarian than the rest of us? What if people with future oriented languages save more than other people?
These are BIG claims! I term this literature "Whorfian socioeconomics." It's linguistic relativity for the big leagues. Not just how we think, or how we go about our lives, but how whole societies are oriented.
I also think that the evidentiary base for such claims is very thin. And that is what I do in my forthcoming article: I review the evidence and the tools that people use to make such claims, showing it to be weak.
The first source of evidence is aggregate evidence correlating the presence or absence of a linguistic feature in a country or region's dominant language with some outcome like gender discrimination, authoritarianism, or savings rates.
Plausible, but relies on strong assumptions about ecological validity, and that you've controlled for all possible variables that might confound that relationship.
The second source of evidence is experimental: take bilingual speakers, randomly assign them to hear something or do something in two different languages, and see if their behaviors differ
Also plausible, but these are lousy experiments. Language is a bundled treatment: comparing Russian and Estonian to see the effect of grammatical gender cannot isolate gender from any other difference between these VERY different languages
If you want to argue that grammatical tone affects how we hear music, for example, we need to compare Mandarin with a version of Mandarin that is structurally identical but which has no tones. Such comparisons are impossible.
What's more, fluent bilinguals are weird if you want to argue that language shapes reality. Which reality do they inhabit? By assumption they operate with full competence in both realities, or they wouldn't be fluent. We cannot generalize from them to monolinguals
A third source of evidence is a mix between the two: crossnational surveys that record lots of features of people's lives as well as the languages that they speak, for lots of people all over the world
If you can code all the world's language as to whether they possess a particular linguistic feature, then you can generalize across languages that vary in lots of ways to isolate the effect you care about. Nice, right?
The problem here is that statistical modeling decisions are paramount. I show that the standard methodologies used when authors make such arguments are flawed: they are very likely to uncover spurious statistical associations that look like the effects of language
I acknowledge that this argument is a bit obnoxious on my part. But some of you might enjoy learning just how easy it is for such an analysis to falsely discover completely outlandish linguistic effects.
I show that the findings from the NPR/AER piece on future oriented languages, which relies on this kind of data and analysis for some of its conclusions, aren't robust to plausible ways of modeling uncertainty
So where does this leave us? I want to talk about the practical implications and the normative implications of linguistic relativity and Whorfian socioeconomics for the social sciences
First, the practical side: it matters a lot if Whorfian socioeconomics is right. But the evidence is thin and imperfect. I am convinced that a weak version of linguistic relativity is true, but Whorfian socioeconomics has little explanatory power for most questions
If there are Whorfian effects, they are probably tiny. They don't explain much. And for this reason, it should be hard to find them. Think about it: how much crossnational variation in authoritarian attitudes could possibly come from pronouns?
People working in this vein should probably read a lot more linguistics research to understand why linguists themselves are very careful about attributing causal power to any feature of a language
Now, the normative side. I'm going to confess something: I am rooting against Whorfian socioeconomics. I think this it is a dangerous position to hold that language matters in this way.
For reasons why, you can look back to the racist origins and applications of linguistic relativity, used to view certain peoples as primitive, and their languages as holding them back in some way
But I also think that it gets the relationship between language and society wrong, and trivializes some of the most wonderful and remarkable things about language
Language does matter! Language really is one of the only things that makes us all equally and equivalently human. It amazing how generative language is: I can write and think in sentences that no one has ever uttered before
The variety of human language is stunning, and beautiful. There are no objectively good or bad languages, or strong or weak languages. Nobody's thoughts are crippled by the language that they speak
And where language is most beautiful is in its ability to reach across difference. Think of the role of Hebrew in Israel. Or Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia. Or Swahili in Tanzania. Or⦠the list goes on
Language unites us, it doesn't divide us. If you've read this far, you get a present: a link to the preprint π tompepinsky.files.wordpress.com
cc for linguists and others who care about linguistic relativity thesis and its use and abuse in the social sciences: @LanguageLog @JohnHMcWhorter @LaymansLinguist @linguistlist #linguistics
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