22 Facts About Linguistic relativity

Linguistic relativity has been understood in many different, often contradictory ways throughout its history.

Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg who conducted experiments designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently.

Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains, although they are generally weak.

Currently, a balanced view of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better seen as arising from connectionist factors.

Linguistic relativity espoused the viewpoint that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation.

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Linguistic relativity further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels, no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous because of the highly flammable vapors still in the barrels.

Linguistic relativity concluded that the use of the word empty in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regard them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion.

Whorf's most elaborate argument for linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.

Linguistic relativity argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years, " but rather as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them.

Linguistic relativity proposed that this view of time was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.

Linguistic relativity argued that Whorf's English descriptions of a Hopi speaker's view of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English, therefore disproving linguistic relativity.

Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language influences thought and the strong version that language determines thought, Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" proposes that language is a key to culture.

Publication of the 1996 anthology Rethinking Linguistic Relativity edited by Gumperz and Levinson began a new period of linguistic relativity studies that focused on cognitive and social aspects.

Linguistic relativity argued that language is often used metaphorically and that languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think.

Linguistic relativity described four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions about what constitutes linguistic relativity:.

Linguistic relativity's findings show that accounting for brain lateralization offers another perspective.

Linguistic relativity concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in Chinese.

Linguistic relativity concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process while Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker.

The gold standard of psycholinguistic studies on linguistic relativity is finding non-linguistic cognitive differences in speakers of different languages.

Linguistic relativity inspired others to consider whether thought and emotion could be influenced by manipulating language.

Suzette Haden Elgin, who was involved in the early development of neuro-linguistic programming, invented the language Laadan to explore linguistic relativity by making it easier to express what Elgin considered the female worldview, as opposed to Standard Average European languages which she considered to convey a "male centered" world view.

Linguistic relativity's Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms.