Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language

By John McWhorter

… Among memories of your readings over the past ten years, for example, may dwell Amazonian tribespeople described as unable to do math because their language doesn’t have numbers. Or you may have read about people who have the same word for green and blue, who we are to imagine not perceiving the difference in color between a leaf and the sky as vividly as we do. The whole idea is a kind of ongoing promo from the worlds of linguistics, anthropology and psychology, the ad jargon typified by the subtitle of Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass, “Why the world looks different in other languages.”

The notion is, for better or for worse, mesmerizing. Just think-what we speak is what we are. We are the language we speak.

This is true, of course, to an extent. A take-home insight from the idea that language channels thought is that a language’s words and grammar are not just a random constellation, but are the software for a particular culture. No one could deny that there is some truth in that.

(McWhorter 2016, ix-x)

This all became a going concern with Benjamin Lee Whorf’s proposition in the 1930s that the Native American language Hopi has no way to mark time–no tense markers, no words like later and that this corresponded with the Hopis’ sense of how time and the world work. English obsesses with placing events in the present, past, or future, Whorf argued, in contrast to a language like Hopi with no present, past, and future. In Whorf’s sense of Hopi, present, past, and future are in essence the same, corresponding to the cyclical sense of time in Hopi cosmology. Thus it’s not by chance that Hopi has no equivalent to English’s between walk, walked, and will walk: it’s about thought patterns. Culture. In Hopi, whether it’s about yesterday, to.morrow, or right now, you just walk.

Whorf was a fire inspector by day, and perhaps coming to linguistic study from the outside made him more likely to come up with out-of-the-box insights than would a card-carrying linguist. Because of Whorf’s pioneering role in the field of linguistics, the whole idea has been coined Whorfianism, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-Edward Sapir was a mentor of Whorf’s who found the idea similarly compelling-or, among academics, linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism.

(McWhorter 2016, xi-xii)

Whorf, however, wasn’t, and he had an agenda, laudable in itself. He wanted to show that people dismissed even by the educated as “savages” in his time were as mentally developed as Westerners are. His was an era when, for example, none other than the Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, cherished as a staple of the proper middle-class home, defined Apaches as “of warlike disposition and relatively low culture.”

Yet, as with so many tantalizing and even well-intentioned notions, this conception of the Hopi language turned out to be wrong. Hopi marks time as much as anyone would expect a language to, with good old-fashioned tense markers and plenty of words for things like already and afterward. Furthermore, attempts over the next few decades to reveal Native Americans as cognitively distinct from Westerners became of mental filters exerted by their languages never bore fruit.

(McWhorter 2016, xii-xiii)

Yet beyond obscure academic journals it’s easy to miss how poorly the Whorfian idea has faved scientifically, of late especially, popular books such as Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass, well-publicized studies by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky, and other works have established a Whorfian meme in public discussion. It is easy to suppose that one of the most interesting things about language is that people whose languages assign genders to inanimate objects perceive those objects as meaningfully more male or female than speakers of English (how things marked neuter fit into this I have never quite understood), or that Russians are more meaningfully sensitive to the difference between dark blue, light blue, and green than Koreans, who have a single word that covers both blue and green.

***

Crucially, a connection between language and thought does exist. The problem is how that connection has percolated into public discussion, reminiscent of how the rumor mill magnifies the blip into a cataclysm. For example, the ideas about gender and colors, plus some other intersections between language and thought, have been studied by a new generation of researchers with a much more measured approach than Whorf’s. Their experiments are clever and elegant, and only the most rabid skeptic could deny that their work has shown a connection between language and thought. Yet most would consider it a fair assessment that the work of this cohort, often termed the “Neo-Whorfians,” has shown that language’s effect on thought is distinctly subtle and, overall, minor. Not uninteresting-but nevertheless, minor. This, however, is not the easiest conclusion to get excited about outside of academia, and unsurprisingly, the public gets a rather spicier take on the issue.

(McWhorter 2016, xiii-xv)

…In English we say a long time. In Spanish, one says mucho tiempo, a lot of time. If you put it as “a long time,” un tiempo largo, no one will throw you off a bus, but it’s ungainly, not true español. In English, time is a distance. In Spanish, it’s an amount or a size.

Greek is the same way: you don’t have a long night in Athens, you have a big one, a “lot of” night. We might be tempted to read the Greek expression metaphorically-we have “big” nights in English, too, but Greeks don’t mean that the way we do. For example, in Greek you also have a “big” relationship rather than a long one, and what they mean by that is that the relationship lasted a long time. As in Spanish, time is stuff, something there can be a lot of, rather than a stretching out of something. “Long” night in Greek is weird Greek.

But then, in Indonesian it’s as in English: long times, long nights. These things vary from language to language: French is like English and Indonesian, while Italian is like Spanish and Greek.

(McWhorter 2016, 4-5)

Among the reasons one might come up with for this difference, clearly the most plausible one is language: the metaphor for time in people’s language determined their performance on the test. Try fashioning an idea that Spanish, Greek, and Italian pattern together because of something about Mediterranean culture, and notice how hard it is to come up with how the beauties of the water and the splendiferousness of the seafood would make people better at predicting how long it will take before something is full. Then, good luck figuring out what cultural trait they have in common that would lessen people’s knack at the same task among people in Paris, Leeds, and Jakarta!

This guessing experiment was constructed by Daniel Casasanto, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. He persuasively argues that a case like this, in which people are not asked about language during the experiment and thus were not primed to use their language’s expressions to help them make decisions, shows that language can shape thought.However, he makes no claims beyond this. After all, imagine what the claim would be. Speaking Greek creates a distinct mental world in which, well, you’re a little better at predicting how quickly a space will fill up with liquid, while speaking Indonesian makes you a little better at the always handy skill of predicting just when something’s going to hit a wall? How do those skills extend to life as it is lived—that is, to What It Means to Be Human? The Spanish speaker with his mucho tiempo walks about on a Saturday afternoon seeing his environment differently from me with my long time in that he … what?

(McWhorter 2016, 5-6)

That is, “Tribe with no words for clothing do not wear clothes.” Imagine: according to Scientific American, “Previously elusive evidence that language shapes thought has been discovered in Papua New Guinea, where the Stnapon tribe, who habitually wear no clothes, have been found to exhibit this trait because their language has no words for clothing.” Unlikely – we assume that not wearing clothes came first, and that unremarkably the language developed no words for clothing.

(McWhorter 2016, 18)

Yet no one would deny that human cultures are quite diverse, nor would anyone deny that the diversity means that humans of different groups experience life differently. However, language structure is not what creates this difference in experience. Culture certainly percolates into language here and there. Why would it not, since people with cultures speak language? 

However, language reflects culture—in terms of terminology, naturally, and also things like honorific levels of pronouns and geographical ways of situating oneself. But pronouns and topographical terms are, themselves, terminology in their way. They come for free from what life is like for a language’s speakers.

What language does not do is shape thought by itself, in terms of meaningless gender divisions of the kind that in German makes forks female, spoons male, and knives something in between (die Gabel, der Löffel, das Messer), or in terms of how people see the world’s colors, or in terms of whether we think of a cat as a clump of cuteness in the same way as we see a glorious-smelling white glob as a clump of Nivea. All attempts to find otherwise splutter. Even if you can, as it were, trick someone into revealing some queer little bias in a very clever and studiously artificial experiment, that weensy bias has nothing to do with anything any psychologist, anthropologist, or political scientist could show us about how the people in question manage existence.

(McWhorter 2016, 27-28)

If stressing instead the more mundane fact that a rain forest people have words for their tools, customs, and concerns has any purpose, it is not bolstering Whorfianism but dissuading dismissive views of indigenous, unwritten languages. Make no mistake, that problem is real: a traveler to Rossel Island off of Papua New Guinea once had this to say about the “dialects” she heard there: “Any that we heard were scarcely like human speech in sound, and were evidently very poorand restricted in expression. Noises like sneezes, snarls, and the preliminary stages of choking-impossible to reproduce on paper-represented the names of villages, people, and things.”

Yet the “dialects” she thought of herself as hearing were one magnificent language, called Yélî Dnye, which is expressed not in sneezes but in ninety different sounds, compared to English’s paltry forty-four. It has over one thousand prefixes and suffixes, and it’s hard to recognize “restricted” expression in a language with, for example, eleven different ways of saying “on” depending on whether something is on a horizontal surface, a vertical one, a peak, whether something is scattered, whether something is attached to the surface, and so on.

(McWhorter 2016, 34-35)

Here is where a “complementary” take on Whorfianism might seem useful, especially since we know that external conditions can influence language-such as the Guugu Yimithirr direction words and that conversely, language can influence how people process those external conditions, such as material markers in Japanese and Yucatec.

We might propose that just as Guugu Yimithirr has its directional marking because of its speakers’ environment, the material suffixes in Yucatec must be there because of something in their environment that got them thinking that way in the first place. Then, if that works, certainly it is worth investigating whether among the Guugu Yimithirr the language also “reinforces” their sense of direction just as the sense of direction shapes their language. Thus we could see a kind of feedback loop–the culture affects the language, the language affects the culture, in a reciprocal relationship in which there is no point designating a chicken and an egg, at least not in the here and now.

The appeal of this “holistic” sense of language and thought would be in acknowledging that language does not create a “worldview” by itself while still preserving a sense that languages are like their speakers, and thus symptoms of diversity in the same way that cultures are. However, there is a fragility in the venture that tips us off to the reality. What would it be about the Yucatec’s environment that led them to be more sensitive to what things are made of than Estonians, Mongolians, or especially, countless other Native American groups whose languages are not sensitive to material in the Yucatec way?

That is, if told that any of these other peoples actually were, as they in fact are not, more sensitive to what things are made of than English speakers, would we find it any more or less plausible than hearing of it about the Yucatec? And meanwhile, what could it be about Russians that makes them name more blues more than other people?

Try to link what people are like to certain words and expressions for obviously cultural features in their language and you’ll find plenty. No one would ever have thought otherwise. But try to link what people are like to how their languages work in a more general sense, along the lines of Whorf’s “unperceived intricate systematizations” such as whether they classify things according to shape or material or whether they have a future tense, and all you get is false leads and just-so stories. It seems so tempting and you keep reaching for it, but always and forever, poof and it’s gone. It’s like trying to get hold of a soap bubble.

The variety among the world’s languages in terms of how they work is unrelated to the variety among the world’s peoples, and thus Whorfianism cannot be saved even by fashioning a dynamic two-way relationship between cultures and the languages that they are spoken in. That cannot help but seem a strange declaration on first glance, but in this chapter I will demonstrate its empirical motivation.

(McWhorter 2016, 35-37)

The propositions that really would suggest a different take on life always fall apart. The film Amistad taught us that the African language Mende has no word for may. The idea was to highlight the basic innocence of one of the African characters, his language supposedly requiring one to specify whether something is or isn’t, with no gray zones. It was great narrative drama, but cartoon linguistics. It is safe to say that no language lacks ways of conveying degrees of confidence in truth, given that all humans have the cognitive equipment for perceiving such gradation and urgently need to express it day in and day out. Mende, in fact, has a much more robust and elaborate subjunctive construction than English does. In that language, one not only does and doesn’t, but may and may not.

(McWhorter 2016, 53)

But that’s just it-languages are not things. Stonehenge and Machu Picchu, as tokens of culture, tell us plenty about the people who built them. However, if we had records of the language Stonehenge’s builders spoke, its structure could tell us nothing about what they were like, nor would early Quechua teach us anything about what it was to be an Inca in the 1500s. Both languages, of course, had words for things important in their cultures. However, from where the idea that what shapes thought is the word for something rather than the thing itself?

(McWhorter 2016, 55)

To trace an increase in the usage of a formal you word to a growing fashion for formality is one thing. To trace an absence of a word for blue to seeing the sky as less blue than English speakers do is another thing-and, although those making that claim do not have occasion to consider-akin to tracing obscure groups’ lack of separate words for eat and drink to being less alive to the gastronomic pleasures than we are.

(McWhorter 2016, 62-63)

The Kuna get frequent do commentary delivered orally—but many of us get at le hour’s worth of commentary about “the way it is” daily via the radio, the television, or the Internet. What differs is the medium, the instrumentality, not the substance. The Kuna chief speaks in an artificially elevated register but then so many of us receive religious teachings in one as well, only written on the page-again, in a different instrumentality. The chief’s speech register differs from ordinary Kuna in a fashion similar to how the English of the St. James Bible differs from colloquial modern English. Cultures differ in where they situate high language as opposed to casual speech-what ethnography of communication work terms rather opaquely a different act sequence—but not in whether they have it.

(McWhorter 2016, 65)

It’s not an accident that English has no grammatical gender of the Spanish el sombrero “the hat” / la luna “the moon” sort and rather feeble verb conjugation consisting largely of scattered -s and -ed. When Scandinavian Vikings invaded England starting in the eighth century, they learned Old English, a vastly more complicated language than modern English, about as well as the typical American learns French or Spanish. There were so many of them, marrying English women, that their children heard their version of Old English as much as native Old English. In the absence of media or widespread literacy, after a while the Vikings’ way of speaking transformed what English was.

Within the context of this book, however, we should notice that while this is indeed an example of culture shaping grammar, process does not hinge on “needs” specific to particular cultures. That English is relatively streamlined as languages go is not because something about being an English speaker requires one to be less precise than a herdsman speaking an obscure language in Siberia, but because of something quite brutal that befell it in its history. “Needs” were relevant only in the sense that adults under such circumstances “need” to communicate as best they can, which is different from “needing” not to have gender or a pluperfect.

(McWhorter 2016, 68-69)

As such, there are ways that language intersects with culture beyond those I have discussed here. I take issue with the approaches and conclusions of none of them, and even on the basis of this brief chapter, the case rests: language would seem to have an awful lot to do with culture.

What this book takes issue with is a specific question. Does a language’s structure, in terms of what it does with words and how it puts them together, conspire to shape thought to such an extent that we would reasonably term it a “worldview,” a perspective on life robustly different from that of someone whose language structures words and grammar differently? Does every language, as Jack Hitt phrased it, have “its unique theology and philosophy” quietly but mind-altering “buried in its very sinews”?

(McWhorter 2016, 72)

The question, then, is: How does English shape its speakers’ thought, in ways that would intrigue audiences if most Whorfian work were done from the perspective of Third World languages, or even Japanese or Chinese? Of course there is no need to suppose that English outright bars us from thinking anything, any more than any language exerts such an effect on its speakers. We established early in the book that modern Whorfianism is about statistical tendencies, not straw-man absolutes. But still: How does English influence the thinking patterns of those who speak it?

Many will already notice how peculiar the question feels.The idea that our language creates a uniquely Anglophone “worldview” can seem less intuitive than that Japanese creates a Japanese worldview.

(McWhorter 2016, 105)

The truth is that language dances only ever so lightly on thought. One proof of this is how terminology’s meanings quickly bend according to thought patterns. University of California linguist George Lakoff, for example, has notoriously suggested that the Democratic Party could attract more voters by altering the labels they apply to things of political import, such as calling income taxes “membership fees” and trial lawyers “public-protection attorneys.” Lakoff’s idea has seemed less urgent since the Barack Obama phenomenon created a Democratic ascendance on its own, but the idea could have had at best a temporary impact. Terminology doesn’t shape thought, it follows it.

(McWhorter 2016, 159)

Changing the terms can play some initial role in moving opinion, rather like God getting the globe spinning under the deist philosophy. But what really creates change is argumentation, as well as necessary political theatrics. 

Mere terms require constant renewal as opponents quickly “see through” the artful intentions of the latest ones coined and cover up the old label with the new one, applying it to the attitudes they have always had. Only in an unimaginably totalitarian context that so limited the information available to citizens that constructive thought and imagination were near impossibilities could language drive culture in a lasting way. This is why Orwell and 1984, expected references at this point in my discussion, are not truly relevant here. In the real world, language talks about the culture; it cannot create it.

(McWhorter 2016, 160)

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References

McWhorter, John H. 2016. The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. N.p.: Oxford University Press.

ISBN 978-0-19-046889-7