In his book The Language Hoax, John McWhorter writes about one of the longstanding myths in linguistics: Language influences and defines the way that people things. Like his other books, McWhorter writes about how focusing too much on the differences in language is an excuse for the elite to look down upon others.
At the heart of “The Language Hoax” is the idea that while language reflects culture and identity, it does not shape our thought processes to the extent traditionally believed. McWhorter challenges the linguistic idea of Whorfianism, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, head-on, arguing that the differences in language do not result in significant differences in worldview.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was created int the 1930s and 1940s. Benjamin Lee Whorf, building on Edward Sapir’s ideas, conducted his studies on the Hopi language and culture in the early to mid-20th century. Whorf observed that the Hopi language has no words directly translating to ‘past’, ‘present’, or ‘future’, leading him to argue that Hopis perceive time differently from English speakers. This linguistic structure suggested to Whorf that Hopi speakers see time as a continuous process rather than as distinct segments.
This idea has taken hold in the linguistic community and people still do research on it today. However, McWhorter points out that while the structure of language has little to do with actually affecting thoughts, this notion still exists in the popular press. For example, we will read articles about the Pirahã people of the Amazon who have a very limited system of numerals, essentially not having distinct words for specific numbers beyond ‘one’, ‘two’, and ‘many’. This gives rise to articles like Tribe without names for numbers cannot count. However, in reality, they don’t have much use of abstract math in their society, so the language never developed words for numbers.
John McWhorter makes the argument that when people use the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in popular culture, they are fetishizing other languages. In the name of diversity, they are looking at other languages as having intersecting differences from English but essentially looking at English as a baseline from which all other languages differ and fundamentally the normal and base place to start. At best they are trying to show that all of these people of the world who speak these oddball languages are as cognitively sophisticated as English speakers.
In English, in popular culture, we joke about an immigrant who doesn’t use the articles like “a”, “an”, and “the.” They might say something like, “Cousin Larry! I buy box of cookies from girl scout!” While it shows the difference between cultures, we can’t help but feeling that the new immigrant is cognitively deficient in some ways.
But having articles is not an essential feature in a language to expressing thoughts. Languages have different syntactic feature to express the same ideas. For example, Russian doesn’t have articles. However, a Russian speaker can still express the same ideas without using articles by altering word order, employing different grammatical structures, or using contextual clues.
Additionally, other languages have grammatical features that don’t exist in English. Take evidential markers for instance. Evidential markers, which don’t exist in English, are part of the grammatical systems in languages like Turkish and Quechua. They provide specific information about the source and reliability of knowledge within the structure of the language itself. These markers can show whether information is observed, inferred, or reported, adding a layer of context and clarity to communication that English speakers typically must deduce from context or additional explanation.
To sum up, “The Language Hoax” not only challenges the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but also sheds light on the casual racism embedded in popular perceptions of language. McWhorter’s analysis encourages us to move beyond English-centric views and to recognize the cognitive equality of all language speakers, promoting a more inclusive and respectful approach to linguistic diversity.
Excerpt 1: I’ve always believed that people rename things pretending that by changing the name we change how we think. I found this except particularly powerful.
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.
Consider terms such as affirmative action, now so conventional we rarely stop to parse what the actual words composing it mean: “affirming” what? What kind of “action”? The term was artful and gracious, giving a constructive, positive air to an always controversial policy. Note, however, that political opponents soon came to associate the term with the same negative feelings they had about the policy it referred to, such that today it is uttered with scorn by many.
Welfare is similar. The contrast between the core meaning of the word and its modern political associations is instructive, in that one can easily imagine a Lakoff in the 1930s proposing exactly the word welfare as a label for government assistance. Notably, another term of art for the same policy, home relief, rapidly took on the same kinds of negative associations. Similarly, if an issue commonly attracts dismissive attitudes, those regularly accrete to any new-terms applied. This happened quickly to urgently intended terms such as male chauvinist and women’s liberation, as well as special education.
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.
Excerpt 2: In his book Human Universals, Donald Brown highlights how similar humans are across cultures. You can find the full list of Universals here. Here’s an example about art. that McWhorter quotes:
The speakers of the creole language Saramaccan in the Surinamese rain forest that I mentioned previously, create, as all humans do, art. Collectors have valued their baskets, textiles, and woodcarvings, thinking of them as testaments to age-old indigenous tradition. We imagine the Saramaka passing the same artistic patterns down one generation after another, such that today’s carver is carrying on the tradition of his distant ancestors in seventeenth-century Surinam, when the society formed.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Surinam’s artists, while thoroughly immersed in respect for their ancestors, are no more interested in cranking out the same patterns year after year than anyone else. Among them, just as with any sculptor in Paris or Los Angeles, art changes throughout a lifetime and over generations. To them, a basket weaved a hundred years ago is instantly identifiable as old-fashioned, and not something any weaver would make today.
A Surinam artist told an anthropologist, after mentioning the constant novelty in the West,
“Well, friend, it’s exactly the same with our woodcarving! My uncle’s generation only knew how to make those big, crude designs–the one we call “ow’s eyes’ and “jaguar’s eyes” —but since then men have never stopped making improvements. Almost every year there’s something new, something better. Right up to today.”
The men are also rather irritated by Western collectors’ notion that their work must have quaint or exotic “meanings” about things like fertility or eternal dualities. To them, their artworks are … art, fashioned the way it is out of the basic human creative impulse.