A Year in Language, Day 38: Linguistic Relativity
Though you may not be familiar with the term “linguistic relativity” or its other name, “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”, you have heard of it. It is the claim that language effects the way we perceive reality be it culturally, psychologically, or even biologically.
Let me get one thing right of the bat: for the most part this idea is just wrong. It is certain that language is a part of culture, and therefore the home to elements of culture and a reflection of those who speak it, but almost every line of the style “X people don’t have a word for Y because/which means Z” is not only wrong, but frequently racist. There is no word for frown in German. Does this mean they are a pleasant people, who just don’t get the concept? Or perhaps they are so dour all the time that frowning is considered standard and unmarked as simply background noise. Or maybe they just say “to wrinkle ones brow” instead because in the end there are many things human faces do to express displeasure and there’s no reason they should fixate on the same feature we do.
A common version of this idea is the “eskimo words for snow” idea. If you have somehow missed this bit of “common knowledge”, it simply states that Eskimo people, who live in the frozen parts of the northern hemisphere, have many, many words for snow, because of course they live in it. However, there are many issues here. For one there is no one Eskimo language, and even when we choose one, say Inuit Inuktitut, we know have to decide what constitutes a word, because that language is highly inflectional and thus a single root can be conjugated thousands of ways. Also consider that we English speakers have ample words of our own: snow, sleet, avalanche, drift, rime, black snow, snowstorm, etc.
There are some ways that modern research shows language may actually impact us. Speakers of tonal languages have better pitch. Speakers of languages with only geocentric coordinates (only north, south, no left or right) have better internal compasses. Both these abilities though are kind of secondary though, as they are more a result of you constantly noting speech tones or tracking North than a purely linguistic development. There have been several interesting studies of color, showing that speakers whose languages differentiate certain parts of the light spectrum will be slightly faster at identifying changes across those boundaries than those whose languages do not. If you would like an incredibly good read on this topic that gives it a very fair look, with good science, and very approachable language, I highly recommend “Through the Language Glass” by Guy Deutscher.
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