Manvir Singh writes:

Everyone can agree that language affects thought. If I told you that I have a pet badger and twenty-two canaries, you’d have new thoughts about my home life. The real question is whether a language itself has features that affect how its speakers think: Does conversing in Spanish for a month make objects seem more gendered? Does speaking English rather than Hindi make you less casteist, and maybe more capitalist?

Today, questions like these tend to be associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, a fire-insurance analyst who studied linguistics at Yale in the nineteen-thirties. History has been both kind and unkind to him. On the one hand, his name has become synonymous with a theory about how language affects thought, though it predated him by at least a century. On the other hand, the version of the theory often attributed to him is so radical that few modern scholars would want the honor, anyway.

Whorf laid out his views in an essay titled “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language.” Contrasting the way time is discussed by English speakers (as an object that can be quantified and divided) and by Hopi speakers (as a more continuous process, or so Whorf believed), he suggested that linguistic differences contributed to differences in how each group understands temporal flow. Despite the boldness of his claims, he was also cautious, proposing merely “traceable affinities” between language and behavior, nothing ironclad, and stressing that he was “the last to pretend that there is anything so definite as ‘a correlation.’ ”

Unfortunately, that nuance has usually been forgotten. Whorf has since become the mascot of linguistic determinism—the position that language is the ultimate arbiter of thought. Whorfianism, as it’s sometimes called, quickly dissolves into absurdities: if your language lacks a proper future tense, tomorrow will be inconceivable; if your language lacks certain emotion words, you will never feel them. Preverbal infants, orangutans, and all other creatures incapable of language are, by implication, powerless to perform many basic mental operations.

Whorfianism has been the target of relentless discrediting. Some of the most striking counterexamples involve individuals unable to produce or comprehend language. Take the case of Brother John, a fifty-year-old French Canadian who suffered from spells of aphasia. Even during periods when he had lost the faculty of language, he mostly got along fine, according to a 1980 study published in Brain and Language. He could manipulate complex tools, follow instructions he’d been given beforehand, and sometimes succeed in hiding his impairment from others. The Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has had much to say about Whorfian fallacies. He has shown how common experiences—like searching for the right word or inventing a new term for an existing intuition—invalidate the idea that language always precedes thought. Writing in “The Language Instinct” (1994), he concludes that Whorfianism is “wrong, all wrong.”

That’s a fair assessment if we’re talking about the strongest interpretation of Whorf’s arguments. Yet the picture emerging from the latest research is more complicated. Whorfianism is wrong—but it isn’t all wrong. [Continue reading…]