THE SOCIAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE:

The Relationship between Language, Thought and Culture

INTRODUCTION

The hypothesis that language both expresses and creates categories of thought
that are shared by members of a social group and that language is, in part,
responsible for the attitudes and beliefs that constitute what we call culture, is a
hypothesis that various disciplines have focused on in various ways. Some
researchers who studied the relationship between language, thought and culture are
Sapir, Benjamin Whorf of which the theories were very popular at that time.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has changed the way many people look at the
relationship between language, thought and cultural perception of reality. It has
influenced many scholars and opened up large areas of study. While many like
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf support the notion that language strongly
influences thought and others argue that language does not influence thought, the
evidence from research indicates that language does influence thought and
perception of reality to a degree but language does not govern thought or reality.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Benjamin Whorf, an amateur linguist and fire inspector for Hartford
Insurance Company, studied with Sapir at Yale and was deeply impressed with his
mentor's view of thought and language. Whorf extended Sapir's idea and illustrated it
with examples drawn from both his knowledge of American Indian languages and
from his fire-investigation work experience. The stronger form of the hypothesis
proposed by Whorf is known as linguistic determinism. This hypothesis has become
so closely associated with these two thinkers that it is often 'lexicalized' as either the
Whorfian hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
A theory of the relationship between speech and thought associated with
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf or the SapirWhorf Hypothesis covers two
distinct theories:
- linguistic determinism: a view that the way in which we perceive and
categorize the world is shaped by the language we speak (language
determines thought)
- linguistic relativity: a view that each language has categories and distinctions
which are unique to it (difference in language equals difference in thought)
Linguistic relativity is the belief that the conceptual system underlying the
language that an individual speaks will affect the way in which that individual thinks
about the world and, accordingly, the way in which that individual will reason when
solving problems.
The theory is based on the idea that there are numerous ways to conceive of
the world. Whorf and Sapir argue:
We cut up natureorganize it into conceptsand ascribe significances as we
do, largely because of absolutely obligatory patterns of our own language.
(Whorf)
The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which have to be
organized largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. (Whorf)
Meanings are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it, because
of the tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation to the world.
(Sapir)
A major test for linguistic determinism was found in the fact that languages
divide up the colour spectrum differently. If it could be shown that we do not all
perceive the spectrum in the same way, it would suggest that our perception of the
real world is indeed shaped by the way in which our language classifies and
subcategorises it. In fact, research suggests that focal points (prototypes) for
particular colours are not only shared by speakers of the same language, but are also
shared across languages. There is agreement on typical values for colours even
where a language possesses fewer colour terms than English.
Languages differ in two major ways: lexically and grammatically. Both of
these areas have been explored in great detail in efforts to investigate the intuitively
appealing linguistic relativism hypothesis.

Lexical Differences

Eskimo and Snow
It is the most commonly used example. The name of Eskimo itself in
derived from eskimantik, which means eater of raw meat or fish. Eskimo
is one of native groups of Alaska and have different vocabularies to name
snow.
- aput 'snow on the ground',
- gana 'falling snow or snowflakes',
- piqsirpoq 'drifting snow',
- quimuqsuq 'a snow drift'
- akilukak fluffy fallen snow and
- kaguklaich snow drifted in rows
People from different languages can perceive all these terms as snow.
But for the Eskimo people each of the different conditions have their own
name or word. Brake-Smith stated that the language has many separate single
words to refer to different kind of snow; hence snow mush be an important
parts of these groups lives.

Colour Systems
All human beings have similar perceptual systems; yet languages vary
in the way in which they divide up the spectrum. This provides a test case for
linguistic determinism. Does language simply provide a set of convenient
categories or does it affect the way in which colours are actually perceived?
The cognitive anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in their
research suggested that focal points (prototypes) for particular colours are not
only shared by speakers of the same language, but are also shared across
languages. There was agreement on typical values even where a language
possessed fewer colour terms than English. This finding was supported by
later research on naive subjects (English-speaking young children and
speakers of Dugum Dani, which has only two basic colour terms).

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay established that there are 11 basic color
terms. Focal colours were said to be perceptually more salient, more
accurately remembered and more rapidly named.
When a language contains fewer than 11 basic color terms the terms
consist of unions of the basic categories. Black and white, or light and dark, is
the minimal set. Red is the color that will be added next, hence the term
"laundry sorting theory". If there are between 4 and 6 terms those terms will
be composed by adding yellow, blue or green. At this point all of the
'primary' or basic opponent colors are present. The next color to be added will
be brown (a mixture of yellow and black). Then come purple (red and blue),
pink (red and white), orange (red and yellow), and gray (black and white).
Basic color terms were defined as those color names that fulfilled all
of the following criteria:
1. consist of only one morpheme
2. not contained within another color word
3. not restricted to a small number of objects (e.g., blond)
4. common and generally known

For instance, if a race of people had a physiological defect of being able to see
only the color blue, they would hardly be able to formulate the rule that they saw
only blue. The term, blue would convey no meaning to them, their language would
lack color terms, and their words denoting their various sensations of blue would
answer to, and translate, our words 'light, dark, white, black' and so on, not out word
'blue'.
This lead a hypothesis of Language Determinism = Language structure
controls thought and cultural norms.
"It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the
grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas
but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individuals
mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis for his mental stock
in trade".

Grammatical Differences

Thinking of the Future
Consider the speech of the fictional 'river people' in Carter's novel
'The infernal desire machine of Doctor Hoffman':
The speech of the river people posed philosophical as well as
linguistic problems. For example, since they had no regular system of plurals
but only an elaborate system of altered numerals for denoting specific
numbers of given objects, the problem of the particular versus the universal
did not exist and the word 'man' stood for 'all men'. This had a profound
effect on their societisation. The tenses divided time into two great chunks, a
simple past and a continuous present. A future tense was created by adding
various suffixes indicating hope, intention and varying degrees of probability
and possibility to the present stem.
On first reading this seems logical: if the river people have no simple
future tense this should affect their conception of the future as a simple
counterpart to the past. The striking thing about this example is that it is an
accurate description of the English tense system. We are obligated to use
modal auxiliaries that express hope, intention and varying degrees of
probability and possibility when we refer to the future.
We say, "I might walk", "I will walk", "I should walk" and "I shall walk".
Whereas in the past or present tense it is not necessary to express hopes and
intentions:
We say simply, "I walked" and 'I am walking".
Do we want to claim that English speakers have a different conception
of the future than French speakers who have a "proper" future tense?

Bloom's Counterfactual Hoax
In English the subjunctive is used to express counterfactual
statements: events that are known to be false but are entertained as
hypotheticals. Chinese lacks a subjunctive, thus counterfactuals must be
expressed circuitously. Bloom claimed to find evidence for the Whorfian
hypothesis by demonstrating that Chinese speakers had more difficulty with
counterfactual statements than English speakers. Bloom presented 120 native
Chinese speakers and 55 native English speakers with a story about a
European philosopher named Bier. He tested their understanding of a
counterfactual statements of the form 'If Bier had known about the technique
to master the Chinese language, he would certainly discover the different
attitudes between the Chinese and European philosophers.' 54 of Bloom's
American subjects understood the implications of this sentence, in
comparison to only 8 of his Chinese subjects.
Terry Kit-Fong Au, a native Chinese speaker and psychologist at
Harvard, did not take kindly to this linguistic slight of his presumed powers
of reasoning. He repeated Bloom's experiment with one crucial change: he
asked Chinese bilinguals to translate an idiomatic Chinese version of the
story into English. With this translation his results were in the reverse
direction from Bloom's. Only 60% of American high school students who
read the non-idiomatic versions understood the counterfactual, whereas 97%
of Au's monolingual Chinese subjects who were given an idiomatic Chinese
version grasped the significance of the counterfactual.

Hopis Uto-Aztecan Language
Whorf studies of Hopi conception of time in 1930s reports are:
- The Hopi do not pluralize nouns referring to time, such as days and years.
Instead, time is viewed as duration.
- The Hopi do not use words denoting phases of a cycle, such as summer as
a phase of year, as noun. Whorf suggested that the Hopi view of time is
the perpetual getting later of it.
- The Hopi do not see time as a linear in that there are no tenses in the
language. Whorf observed that the Hopi have no words, no grammatical
forms, constructions, or expressions that refer to time.
Fishman and Hoijer argued that subsequent did not support all the
claims made by linguistic determinist researchers. In the case of the Hopi
conception of time, Ekkehart Malotki, an anthropologist from Northern
Arizona University who standardized a writing system for the Hopi,
documented many references to time he had found in the Hopi language. He
showed that Hopi speech contains tense, metaphors for time, units of time
(including days, numbers of days, parts of the day, yesterday and tomorrow,
days of the week, weeks, months, lunar phases, seasons, and the year), ways
to quantify units of time, and words like 'ancient', 'quick', 'long time', and
'finished'."

Though Whorfs Hopi example might not stand, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
does offer a useful way of thinking about the relationship between language and
culture in the linguistic relativity view, meaning that linguistic characteristics and
cultural norms influence each other.
The hypothesis = Culture is controlled by and controls language
The cognitive processes that are determined, which are promoted by
Whorfian thesis, are different for different languages:
"We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we
do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way
an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in
the patterns of our language"
Steinfatt (1989) argued that the basic of linguistic relativity is that the
difference between languages is not what can be said but what is relatively easy to
say.

CONCLUSION

For Whorf, the whole picture is necessarily complicated. Our thoughts and
perception must have impact on our words. Whorf suggested that:
The strong version states that the language you speak shapes the way you
think. It is known as linguistic determinism: the background linguistic system of each
language is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individuals
mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis for his mental stock
in trade. It means that language structure controls thought and cultural norms.
But words form part of grammar, and "formulation of ideas is not an
independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular
grammar". Culture is built from an accumulation of thoughts and words, which in
turn has a give-and-take relationship with language as Whorf articulated in quotes
above. Whorf viewed that culture is controlled by and controls language.
This is known as linguistic relativity. The weak version states that the
presence of certain linguistic categories in a language influences the ease with which
cognitive operations are performed: the basic of linguistic relativity is that the
difference between languages is not what can be said but what is relatively easy to
say.

REFERENCES

Field, John. Psycholinguistics The Key Concepts. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
http://www.duke.edu/~pk10/language/ca.htm
Jandt, Fred E. An Introduction to Intercultural Communication. San Bernandino:
California State University
Phipps, Stacy. 2001. Language And Thought: Examining Linguistic Relativity
Schlenker, P. 2006 - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language UCLA.