Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic Relativity

  • Submitted By: reesee
  • Date Submitted: 03/03/2009 8:09 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1522
  • Page: 7
  • Views: 1

Benjamin Lee Whorf is recognized as one of the leading linguists of the twentieth century. His theories have shaped the way all forms of scientific disciplines view language and communication and the origins of both. Anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists alike find reason to challenge or defend his work even sixty years after his death. Perhaps Whorf’s most compelling contribution to linguistic theory is his “linguistic relativity hypothesis” or the idea that there is a direct relationship between language and thought, specifically, that language influences an individual’s perception of the world.
Whorf formulated this theory based on his studies of the languages of Native Americans. His linguistic relativity theory suggests that the design of a language contains a speculation of the structure of the universe it describes. His research of the Hopi Indians, in particular, led him to determine that the Hopi had an altered view of reality, or their universe, than that to which he was accustomed. One of the pieces of evidence that he identified in support of this was that the Hopi had no concept of time as a “smooth flowing continuum” (Whorf qtd in Duranti 58); an idea that is shared by most languages and realities. Because of this altered view, the reality of the Hopi, who do not measure the passing of days, is vastly different and therefore leads them to a system of language that is based on other concepts (Duranti 58-59). The absence of the measurement of time by the Hopi and the shaping of their language in response to this missing concept is certainly, in my opinion, a verification of Whorf’s theory.
Whorf contends that the only way to study language variations is to observe the grammatical patterns between languages that are radically different, as is the case with English and Hopi. Whorf’s further dissection of this idea revealed the existence of “configurations” or overt and covert grammatical categories know as phenotypes and cryptotypes (Duranti...

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