Language contact studies

The comparative school of linguistics, which developed after 1786 in

the wake of the discovery of Indo-European, views the historical
development of language as a gradual process of change, of language
divergence over time. The speakers of a language spread out and become
isolated from one another; dialects develop, then gradually evolve into
separate languages. The metaphor of linguistic families consisting of mother
and daughter languages works well for describing this type of evolutionary
process.

But language history cannot be completely understood without also

studying the phenomenon of language contact and mixing. This second
aspect of the history of language has traditionally been studied as a sort of
sociolinguistic footnote in historical linguistics (for instance, the need to
exclude borrowed words from historical-comparative studies). However, as
we shall see, language contact often plays a very important role in the
history of languages. The history of a language involves gradual evolution as
well as sudden changes brought about by various types of language contact.
The metaphor of mother and daughter languages is inadequate for
describing the effects of languages interacting and mixing. Many problems
in historical linguistics have not been solved because the effects of language
mixing have not been given proper attention. Let's look at some of these
possible effects.

The languages of peoples isolated from contact with other languages--such

as an island community speaking a single language (Hawaii before Captain
Cook, for instance, or Iceland) tend to change very slowly. The primary
types of language changes in such a situation are indeed internal
spontaneous changes and gradual invention of vocabulary. It would be
possible to study the historical development of Icelandic or Polynesian
languages using the traditional model of comparative linguists with little
attention to language contact or mixing.

Such instances of language isolation, however, are fairly rare. Even in

aboriginal Australia and the Americas--areas long isolated from the main
centers of human contact and mixing, tribes living in close proximity often
interacted in ways that produced rapid language change.

How can significant language contact between two or more adjacent

groups affect the languages involved? There are several possible outcomes.

1) Occasionally, language contact between different speech communities

leads to linguistic divergence. Language contact may precipitate a
deliberate attempt speakers to maintain or even increase linguistic
differences. In Australia and New Guinea cases have been found where
neighboring tribes have deliberately attempted to alter their languages to
make them even more different from the speech of neighboring tribes. This
phenomenon seems especially prevalent in societies where the very form of
language is thought to have magical properties. In parts of Australia and
New Guinea, sounds seem to have been deliberately dropped only because
they happened to be shared by a neighboring tribe. (This is what would
happen, for example, if the French were to drop their front rounded vowels
just because the Germans also had these sounds.) Also, many tribes have
devised special ritualistic forms of languages that use rare sounds such as
ingressives or clicks; the purpose is to make the ritual language as different
as possible from other forms of speech. On a smaller scale, the same desire
to be different causes every generation of teenagers and other groups of
English speakers to adopt special slang words and ways of speaking as a
badge of their independence, of their in-groupness.

The same kind of impetus toward deliberate divergence can also be seen
in belated attempts by the speakers of one language to "purify" their
language by purging the effects of past borrowing. A mild example of
intentional language divergence can be seen in the efforts by the French
Academ of Language to expel English words from their language to preserve
the "purity," of French, or recent in Kazakh efforts to replace Russianisms.

Thus, language contact may trigger a desire to be different and may

motivate deliberate changes in native speech patterns (as well as belated
attempts to purge the effects of past borrowing). It is unknown how great a
role such deliberate linguistic tinkering has played in the creation of the
world's present linguistic diversity. Perhaps intentional divergence played a
significant role in the dim past of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, when
groups were small and cohesive enough for this type of linguistic
engineering to be successful.

2) A far more commonly encountered effect of language contact, at least

in the period of recorded history, is one of language convergence--an
increase in shared features between neighboring languages due to various
processes of language mixing. The social contact required to produce
language mixing exists in various forms, each of which has its own particular
effects. Below I'll discuss five types of language convergence.

a) The first situation involves contact between two language communities

who maintain a high degree social separation. Both language communities
retain their native language and only borrow select items. A large number
of words may be borrowed, particularly if one group acts as the source of
new items of culture or environment for the other. Precisely this type of
language contact accounts for the large number of Arabic loan words
borrowed together with the new religion of Islam into such unrelated
languages as Turkish, Farsi, and Malay.

In instances of selective borrowing, new words tend to be phonetically

reshaped to fit the phonological pattern of the language recipient (for
instance, when importing Islamic religious terms, such languages as Malay
and Turkish dropped the Arabic pharyngeals). Occasionally, however, when
large numbers of new vocabulary items are borrowed, new sounds or new
sound combinations may arise in the recipient language. (Cf. [f] borrowed
from Greek by the Russians, or, more recently the combinations [shm], [shl]
borrowed into English from Yiddish). New word building techniques may
even develop (such as the technique of compounding semantically opposing
nouns such as firewater borrowed by English on the basis of Native American
polysynthesis.) Usually, however, the impact of borrowing between two
independent language communities is limited to new vocabulary and rarely
has much influence on the grammatical structure of a language.

b) A high degree of bilingualism between speakers of adjacent languages

over a prolonged period of time seems to facilitate the gradual process of
language convergence that affects all levels of language, especially the
phonology. This is the case in the Balkans with various distantly related
Indo-European languages (Slavic, Albanian and Greek), which all share
certain features of grammar, such as the evidential verb forms--acquired
through centuries of contact with the Turks. Such an area of gradual
linguistic convergence between non-related or perhaps distantly related
languages can produce what is know as a Sprachbund (a group of
unrelated languages with shared structural features). There are
Sprachbunds in the Caucasus mountains (great numbers of consonant
clusters; preponderance of glottalized sounds) along the northern Pacific
coast (many labialized and glottalized sounds, lack of nasals).

c) A third contact-based situation that causes language convergence

requires significant intermarriage or other types of family-level intermixing
between speech communities. A large number of the members of one
linguistic group may be incorporated into the social structure of another
group in various ways: either as spouses, as servants and slaves as a result
of war, or as refugees adopted as equal members of the
tribe. Intermarriage frequently occurs between different speech
communities, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily on the part of
the incoming spouse. When such mixing occurs on a large or prolonged
scale, the effect on the language of the incorporating community often goes
deeper than the mere borrowing of words. This is especially the case when
large groups of women are incorporated into the community from outside--
be it as wives, or as servants or slaves charged with helping raise
children. If the newcomers are beyond the age of adolescence, they will
necessarily learn the new language with imperfections caused by
interference of their native tongue. If there are a large enough number of
these non-native- speaking women, they will affect their children's speech--
bringing about significant changes in a language. Children can be strongly
affected when raised primarily by non-native speakers or by speakers with a
particular dialectal peculiarity. This occurred on a modest scale in the
American South during the pre-Civil War era, when Black English affected
the pronunciation of southern upper class white children. It also occurred in
the formation of the backwoods southern American dialects, which were
undoubtedly influenced by the speech patterns of Cherokee women who
married settlers. And it occurred to an even greater extent in the
development of Dutch into Africans in the Boer Republics of present-day
South Africa, when the speech of the local Bantu tribes as well as imported
East Indian laborers led to radical changes in the way children spoke the
Dutch of the original immigrants. Finally, it occurred to an even greater
extent during the past two thousand years as the Bantu peoples displaced
the native Khoisan speakers throughout southern Africa. The Bantu
languages of southern Africa today contain clicks and other features of
pronunciation not found in the Bantu languages of Central and north-eastern
Africa. These sounds were definitely brought in by the conquered
aborigines.

d) Besides causing language convergence of the types just enumerated,

language contact can also result in an entire group abruptly abandoning its
native speech and adopting a new language. This phenomenon is known
as language shift. Language shift happens every time an immigrant learns
the native language of the new country and passes it down to children in
place of the old country language. If people undergo language shift on the
level of individuals or isolated small groups, then the effects of language
shift on the speech community as a whole will be negligible. Generally, the
linguistic peculiarities of a single person or a small group of single persons
will not be passed down to future generations. If, however, a whole group of
people undergo language transfer en masse, perhaps because the language
they are adopting is considered prestigious, then the features caused by the
interference of their original, native language may be passed down to the
next generation, creating a permanent ethnic dialect or even a new
language.

There are two main reasons why the children of groups that undergo
abrupt language shift might not dissolve homogeneously into the
surrounding linguistic landscape:
 1) They may be segregated--either voluntarily, as in the case of the Amish
of Pennsylvania, or involuntarily as in the case of African Americans.

2) They may be more numerous than the original native speakers, and
thus have the determining effect on the language of the next generation. A
sudden language shift in an entire population--with the accidental language
mixing that always occurs in such a situation-- can create a new, mixed
language--a creole-- within the space of a single generation. This
phenomenon is called abrupt creolization. Such is the case in the
development of many European based creoles in tropical areas where the
European population was constantly decimated by local diseases against
which the natives had more resistance. Abrupt creolization is also thought
to have taken place in India and southern China, where northern peoples
imposed their language on peoples living in more tropical areas. The locals
learned the conqueror's language, disease then left these new speakers in
the majority, and their creolized version of the language became the
language of the next generation.

e) The last and most radical form of language change due to language
mixing involves a situation when several linguistically diverse groups are
confronted with the need to communicate.

Today, for political reasons, every country has a national, or official

language. In countries where many languages are spoken, one often is
chosen as a common language. A language used for communication between
peoples who speak different languages is called a lingua franca. English is
a lingua franca in India and parts of Africa; Russian is a lingua franca in
most of the former USSR; Mandarin Chinese, or Putonghua, serves the
same purpose in the People's Republic of China; as does French in many
parts of West Africa. In Somalia, 97% of pop. speak various dialects of
Somali, but the official language is English. Swahili is a lingua franca spoken
by 40 million people throughout east Africa, mostly as a second
language. Sometimes the lingua franca undergoes simplification or
modification among the many groups who speak it. A slightly simplified
version of a lingua franca is known as a koine, from the Greek word
for common. The original Koine was a modified Greek dialect spoken
throughout the Mediterranean from around 4th cent BC till the 1400's.
Swahili is a Bantu-based koine which developed so that Africans could
communicate with Arab traders.

Sometimes, however, there is no time or opportunity for diverse groups to

learn a second language--even in a modified form. For reasons of
communicative expediency, therefore, people invent what is called a pidgin.
A pidgin is a makeshift mixture of several different languages invented by
and used by adults as a second language. Pidgin languages develop when
several different linguistic groups are suddenly confronted with the need to
communicate with one another, usually for economic purposes of trade (the
word pidgin is supposedly a Southeast Asian corruption of the English
word business). If there ever was a tower of Babel, the polylingual workers
would have had to come up with a pidgin.

What kind of structure might such a pidgin have? The pidgin may be a
random combination of the native languages of various speakers. Or one of
the contributing languages may act as the base to which parts of the other
languages are grafted; thus, there are English-based pidgins in parts of
Africa and Asia, French-based pidgins in the Caribbean and West Africa, etc.
Usually, the culturally dominant language of the region will supply the bulk
of the vocabulary; the grammar is more of a mixture of all the contributing
languages. The original lingua franca, for instance, a term which literally
means Frankish tongue, was the pidgin language Sabir, a Latin based pidgin
used by Europeans in the middle ages to trade with the Arab world. Two
pidgin languages are used today in New Guinea as lingua francas to aid in
communications between the islands several hundred different ethnic
groups: these are Hiri Motu, Tok Pisin, the latter of which literally
means talk pidgin. Notable pidgins in American history are Chinook
jargon, Mobilian in the US southeast, and the Delaware trading language
of the Colonial era.

In the creation of a pidgin, linguists speak of the process

of pidginization, which means a radical structural simplification of language
form. Structurally, a pidgin is not a complete language: it is language
stripped of everything except the bare essentials, with vocabulary usually
limited to practical or economic terms. Pidgins also show great simplification
of the syntactic and phonological patterns found in the contributing
languages.

Also, a true pidgin is not the native language of anybody and in this sense
it is the closest thing we have to a primitive language.

Because of historical circumstances, a pidgin can come to be learned as

the native language of the next generation. In such cases the pidgin quickly
expands its vocabulary and becomes a full-fledged language, called
a creolized pidgin, or simply creole. (The word creole derives from
Portuguese 'crioulo', which meant a European born in a colonial territory.
Creole later came to mean a person of racial mixture and later still came to
mean a mixed language. The process whereby children acquire a pidgin as a
native tongue, then expand it into a full-fledged language is known
as creolization.
 Thus there are two types of creoles: one occurs when children acquire a
pidgin as their native language and expand it into a full-fledged language
(pidgin-based creole); the other when a group abruptly adopts the
language of another group and passes it on to their children, flaws and all,
to form a new dialect of that language (language shift, or abrupt, creole).
Language shift creoles are mixtures of two languages, whereas pidgin-based
creoles are mixtures of several languages, one of which often acts as the
basic source. Examples: English for Hawaiian pidgin, French in Haiti.

What happens to a creole language? It may develop into a separate

language, as happened in India with the descendants of Sanskrit. Or it may
converge with one of the parent languages to and become a minor dialect of
that language. The latter process is known as decreolization. Colonial
Black English was originally a pidgin based on southern English and several
West African languages. It became a creole, the native language of the next
generation, and gradually converged with southern English. One black
dialect that has resisted decreolization more than general Black English
is Gullah (Florida to S. Carolina coast, from West African Ngola
tribe). Today there are over 200 creoles and pidgins (6 million people speak
Creoles and a few million use pidgins on a daily basis).

As a result of various forms of language mixing--be it word borrowing

between separate groups, the gradual influence of long-term bilingualism,
the induction of foreign speakers into the group, abrupt language shift by an
entire group, or a pidgin language being adopted as a native language--
adjacent languages that are historically unrelated can come to resemble one
another in striking ways. Historical linguistics cannot ignore language mixing
in setting up the family trees of languages. The study of creoles--whether
made from pidgins or developed out of language shift--could contribute
greatly to comparative linguistics. The proto-language could itself be a
mixture of other languages (an example might be ancient
Japanese.) Without recognizing language mixing, it is impossible to trace
the ancestry of such languages.

So far we have been talking about the creation of new languages and
dialects. The opposite process--the extinction of a language--which is
known as language death, has been far more common in the past few
hundred years. Since 1400 the linguistic map of the world has changed
radically due to massive language death. European languages have nearly
completely replaced the aboriginal tongues of the Americas, Oceana and
Australia, as well as on isolated islands like Tasmania and the Canary
islands. Thus the effects of language death have outstripped the creation of
new dialects and languages in the recent past. And the process of extinction
of aboriginal languages continues and remnant groups lose their language.
 But even dead languages have a way of living on. A language may mix
with other languages before dying out. The features left behind in the
surviving language represent what is known as substrate influence. The
Russian language shows a substrate influence from the languages of the now
extinct Finnic tribes that once inhabited north eastern Europe. The
Germanic languages show some kind of aboriginal Baltic substrate
influence. Celtic shows all sorts of interesting substrate features, including a
VSO pattern which seem to be borrowed from languages related to
Basque. Substrate influences such as these have been studied inadequately
by historical linguists. No one has ever tried to use substrate features to
reconstruct a dead language that has no living descendants. Yet it might be
possible to do this to some degree and thus extend our knowledge of
language distribution farther back in time.

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Supplement to Relativism

The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think
of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political
notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one
another than various dialects of Chinese are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between
languages will suffice for our purposes.

There are around 5000 languages in use today, and each is quite different from many of the
others. Differences are especially pronounced between languages of different families, e.g.,
between Indo-European languages like English and Hindi and Ancient Greek, on the one hand,
and non-Indo-European languages like Hopi and Chinese and Swahili, on the other.

Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in
experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite
different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages
think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-
hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, after the linguists who made it famous. But the
label linguistic relativity, which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to
separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf's views, which are an endless subject of
exegetical dispute (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996, contains a sampling of recent literature on the
hypothesis).

The suggestion that different languages carve the world up in different ways, and that as a result
their speakers think about it differently has a certain appeal. But questions about the extent and
kind of impact that language has on thought are empirical questions that can only be settled by
empirical investigation. And although linguistic relativism is perhaps the most popular version of
descriptive relativism, the conviction and passion of partisans on both sides of the issue far
outrun the available evidence. As usual in discussions of relativism, it is important to resist all-
or-none thinking. The key question is whether there are interesting and defensible versions of
linguistic relativism between those that are trivially true (the Babylonians didn't have a
counterpart of the word telephone, so they didn't think about telephones) and those that are
dramatic but almost certainly false (those who speak different languages see the world in
completely different ways).

A Preliminary Statement of the Hypothesis

Interesting versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis embody two claims:

Linguistic Diversity:
Languages, especially members of quite different language families, differ in important ways
from one another.

Linguistic Influence on Thought:

The structure and lexicon of one's language influences how one perceives and conceptualizes the
world, and they do so in a systematic way.

Together these two claims suggest that speakers of quite different languages think about the
world in quite different ways. There is a clear sense in which the thesis of linguistic diversity is
uncontroversial. Even if all human languages share many underlying, abstract linguistic
universals, there are often large differences in their syntactic structures and in their lexicons. The
second claim is more controversial, but since linguistic forces could shape thought in varying
degrees, it comes in more and less plausible forms.

1. History of the Hypothesis

Like many other relativistic themes, the hypothesis of linguistic relativity became a serious topic
of discussion in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, particularly in the work of
Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1767-1835). It was later defended by thinkers as diverse as Ernst Cassirer and Peter
Winch. Thus Cassirer tells us that

...the distinctions which here are taken for granted, the analysis of reality in terms of things and
processes, permanent and transitory aspects, objects and actions, do not precede language as a
substratum of given fact, but that language itself is what initiates such articulations, and develops
them in its own sphere (1946, p. 12).

But the hypothesis came to prominence though the work of Edward Sapir and his student
Benjamin Lee Whorf. Indeed, it is often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or simply the Whorf
hypothesis.
There are connections among some of these writers; for example, Sapir wrote his M.A. thesis on
Herder's Origin of Language. Still, this is a remarkably diverse group of thinkers who often
arrived at their views by different routes, and so it is not surprising that the linguistic relativity
hypothesis comes in a variety of forms.

Sapir and Whorf

It will help to see why the linguistic relativity hypothesis captivated so many thinkers if we
briefly consider the more arresting claims of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir was
an American anthropological linguist who, like so many anthropologists of his day, was a student
of Franz Boas. He was also the teacher of Whorf, a businessman and amateur linguist.

Unlike earlier partisans of linguistic relativism, Sapir and Whorf based their claims on first-hand
experience of the cultures and languages they described, which gave their accounts a good deal
of immediacy. I will quote a few of the purpler passages to convey the flavor of their claims, for
this was partly what galvanized the imagination of so many readers.

Sapir

In a paper published in 1929 Sapir tells us:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity
as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has
become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one
adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an
incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection (1929, p. 209).

Our language affects how we perceive things:

Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social
patterns called words than we might suppose. We see and hear and otherwise experience very
largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of
interpretation (p. 210).

But the differences don't end with perception:

The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the
language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct
worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached (p. 209).
Whorf

The linguistic relativity hypothesis grained its widest audience through the work of Benjamin
Lee Whorf, whose collected writings became something of a relativistic manifesto.

Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more
cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his
bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers
than more timid claims would have been.

When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive
differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European
languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, Standard Average European or SAE) often do lead
their speakers to have very different worldviews. Thus

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led
by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic
backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. The relativity of all conceptual
systems, ours included, and their dependence upon language stand revealed (1956, p. 214f, italics
added).

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that
we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer
in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which
has to be organized by our minds--and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds
(p. 213).

no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain
modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free (p. 214).

In fairness it must be stressed that these passages come from a single essay, Science and
Linguistics, of 1940, and in other places Whorf's tone is often more measured. But not always;
elsewhere he also says thing like

users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of
observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not
equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world (1956, p. 221).

And in yet a third essay facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for
unlike formulation of them (1956, p. 235).
The passages from Sapir and Whorf bristle with metaphors of coercion: our thought is at the
mercy of our language, it is constrained by it; no one is free to describe the world in a neutral
way; we are compelled to read certain features into the world (p. 262). The view that language
completely determines how we think is often called linguistic determinism. Hamann and Herder
sometimes seem to equate language with thought, and in these moods, at least, they came close
to endorsing this view.

1.1 Linguistic Relativism and Metaphysics

Some writers have linked these themes directly to issues in metaphysics. For example Graham
(1989, Appendix 2) argues that there are vast differences among human languages and that many
of the concepts or categories (e.g., physical object, causation, quantity) writers like Aristotle and
Kant and Strawson held were central, even indispensable, to human thought, are nothing more
than parochial shadows cast by the structure of Indo-European languages. These notions, it is
said, have no counterparts in many non-Indo-European languages like Chinese. If this is so, then
a fairly strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis might be true, but the thesis hasn't
been backed with strong empirical evidence and the most common views today lie at the
opposite end of the spectrum. Indeed, Whorf himself held a similar view:

[Western] Science has not yet freed itself from the illusory necessities of common logic which
are only at bottom necessities of grammatical pattern in Western Aryan grammar; [e.g.,]
necessities for substances which are only necessities for substantives in certain sentence
positions (1956, pp. 269-270).

It is worth noting, finally, that although Whorf was certainly a descriptive relativist he was not
a normative relativist. He believed that some languages gave rise to more accurate worldviews
than others. Indeed, he thought that the Hopi worldview was superior in various ways to that of
speakers of Indo-European languages (e.g., 1956, p. 55, p. 262).

2. The Many Versions of Linguistic Relativism

Any serious discussion of the linguistic relativity hypothesis requires us to answer three
questions

1. Which aspects of language influence which aspects of thought in some systematic way?
2. What form does that influence take?
3. How strong is that influence?

For example, certain features of syntax or of the lexicon might exert a causal influence on certain
aspects of visual perception (e.g., on which colors we can discriminate), classification (e.g., on
how we sort things by their color), or long-term memory (e.g., on which differences among
colors we remember most accurately) in clearly specifiable ways. If there is such an influence we
would also like to know what mechanisms mediate it, but until we have clearer answers to the
first three questions, we are not well positioned to answer this.

Human languages are flexible and extensible, so most things that can be said in one can be
approximated in another; if nothing else, words and phrases can be borrowed (Schadenfreude, je
ne sais quoi). But what is easy to say in one language may be harder to say in a second, and this
may make it easier or more natural or more common for speakers of the first language to think in
a certain way than for speakers of the second language to do so. A concept or category may be
more available in some linguistic communities than in others (e.g., Brown, 1956, pp. 307ff). In
short, the linguistic relativity hypothesis comes in stronger and weaker forms, depending on the
hypothesized forms and the hypothesized strength of the hypothesized influence.

Language

Various aspects of language might affect cognition.

Grammar
Languages can differ in their grammar or syntax. To take a simple example, typical word order
may vary. In English, the common order is subject, verb, object. In Japanese it is subject, object,
verb. In Welsh, verb, subject, object. Languages can differ in whether they make a distinction
between intransitive verbs and adjectives. And there are many subtler sorts of grammatical
difference as well. It should be noted that grammar here does not mean the prescriptive grammar
we learned in grammar school, but the syntactic structure of a language; in this sense, a grammar
comprises a set of rules (or some equivalent device) that can generate all and only the sentences
of a given language.

Lexicon
Different languages have different lexicons (vocabularies), but the important point here is that
the lexicons of different languages may classify things in different ways. For example, the color
lexicons of some languages segment the color spectrum at different places.

Semantics
Different languages have different semantic features (over and above differences in lexical
semantics)

Metaphor
Different languages employ different metaphors or employ them in different ways.
Pragmatics
It is increasingly clear that context plays a vital role in the use and understanding of language,
and it is possible that differences in the way speakers of different languages use their languages
in concrete settings affects their mental life.

For the most part discussions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis have focused on grammar and
lexicon as independent variables. Thus, many of Whorf's claims, e.g., his claims about the way
Hopi thought about time, were based on (what he took to be) large-scale differences between
Hopi and Standard Average European that included grammatical and lexical differences (e.g.,
1956, p. 158). Subsequence research by Ekkehart Malotki (e.g., 1983) and others suggests that
Whorf's more dramatic claims were false, but the important point here is that the most prominent
versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis involved large-scale features of language.

Thought

Language might influence many different aspects of thought. Most empirical work has focused,
appropriately enough, on those aspects that are easiest to assess without relying on language.
This is important, since we otherwise risk finding influences of one aspect of language on some
related aspect of language, rather than on some aspect of thought. Commonly studied cognitive
variables include perceptual discrimination, availability in memory, and classification.

2.1 Testing the Linguistic Relativity Hypotheses

In light of the vast literature on linguistic relativity hypotheses, one would expect that a good
deal of careful experimental work had been done on the topic. It hasn't. Often the only evidence
cited in favor of such hypotheses is to point to a difference between two languages and assert
that it adds up to a difference in modes of thought. But this simply assumes what needs to be
shown, namely that such linguistic differences give rise to cognitive differences. On the other
hand, refutations of the hypothesis often target implausibly extreme versions of it or proceed as
though refutations of it in one domain (e.g., color language and color cognition) show that it is
false across the board.

2.2 Many Versions of the Hypothesis have not been Tested

A linguistic relativity hypothesis says that some particular aspect of language influences some
particular aspect of cognition. Many different aspects of language could, for all we know,
influence many different aspects of cognition. This means that a study showing that some
particular aspect of language (e.g., the color lexicon of a language) does (or does not) influence
some particular aspect of cognition (e.g., recognition memory of colors) does not tell us whether
other aspects of language (e.g., the lexicon for spatial relations) influence other aspects of
cognition (e.g., spatial reasoning). It does not even tell us whether the single aspect of language
we focused on affects any aspects of thought besides the one we studied, or whether other
aspects of language influence the single aspect of thought we examined.

The point here is not merely a theoretical one. When the mind is seen as all of a piece, whether
it's the result of stepping through Piaget's universal stages of development, the output of
universal learning mechanisms, or the operation of a general-purpose computer, confirming or
disconfirming the hypothesis in one area (e.g., color) might bear on its status in other areas. But
there is increasing evidence that the mind is, to at least some degree, modular, with different
cognitive modules doing domain specific work (e.g., parsing syntax, recognizing faces) and
processing different kinds of information in different kinds of ways. If this is right, there is less
reason to expect that findings about the influence of language on one aspect of cognition will
generalize to other aspects.

The Upshot

Only a handful of versions of the claim that linguistic feature X influences cognitive feature Y in
way Z have ever been tested. Some can doubtless be ruled out on the basis of common sense
knowledge or previous investigation. But many remain that have yet to be studied. Moreover,
those that have been studied often have not been studied with the care they deserve. A few have,
though, and we will now turn to them.

Example: Color Language and Color Cognition

Much of the most rigorous investigation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis involves color
language and color cognition. In the 1950s and 60s, this was an area where linguistic relativity
seemed quite plausible. On the one hand, there is nothing in the physics of light (e.g., in facts
about surface spectral reflectances) that suggests drawing boundaries between colors at one place
rather than another; in this sense our segmentations of the spectrum are arbitrary. On the one
hand, it was well known that different languages had color terms that segmented the color
spectrum at different places. So since nothing in the physics of color could determine how
humans thought about color, it seemed natural to hypothesis that color cognition followed the
grooves laid down by color language.

Color was also an auspicious object of study, because investigators could use Munsell color
chips (a widely used, standardized set of chips of different colors) or similar stimulus materials
with subjects in quite different locations, thus assuring that whatever differences they found in
their dependent variables really did involve the same thing, color (as anchored in the chips),
rather than something more nebulous.
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's work (1969) on basic color terms did much to raise the quality of
empirical work on the linguistic relativity hypothesis. And together with much subsequent work
it strongly suggests that the strongest, across-the-board versions of the linguistic relativity
hypothesis are false when it comes to color language and color cognition. We now know that
colors may be a rather special case, however, for although there is nothing in the physics of color
that suggests particular segmentations of the spectrum, the opponent-process theory of color
vision, now well confirmed, tells us that there are neurophysiological facts about human beings
that influence many of the ways in which we perceive colors. We don't know of anything
comparable innate mechanisms that would channel thought about social traits or biological
classification of diseases in similarly deep grooves. There may well be cross-cultural similarities
in the ways human beings think about these things, but we can't conclude this from the work on
color.

3. Innateness and Linguistic Universals

The linguist Noam Chomsky has argued for almost half a century that human beings could only
learn natural languages if they had a good deal of innate linguistic equipment to guide their way.
He has characterized this equipment in different ways over the years, but the abiding theme is
that without it children could never get from the sparse set of utterances they hear to the rich
linguistic ability they achieve.

3.1 Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments

In just a few years all normal children acquire the language that is spoken by their family and
others around them. They acquire a very complex and virtually unbounded ability to distinguish
sentences from non-sentences and to understand and utter a virtually unlimited number of
sentences they have never thought of before. The child acquires this ability on the basis of the
utterances she hears and the feedback (rarely in the form of corrections) she receives. The
problem is that the child's data here are very unsystematic and sparse compared to the systematic
and nearly unbounded linguistic competence the child quickly acquires.

Hence, the argument continues, the child needs help to get from this impoverished input to the
rich output (the acquisition of a grammar of a complex natural language), and this help can only
be provided by something innate that constrains and guides the child in her construction of the
grammar. The point is quite general: if the input, or data stream, is exiguous then (barring
incredible luck) it is only possible for someone to arrive at the right theory about the data if they
have some built-in inductive biases, some predispositions to form one kind of theory rather than
another. And since any child can learn any human language, the innate endowment must put
constraints on which of the countless logically possible languages are humanly possible.
If the features of human languages are limited by such innate, language-acquisition mechanisms,
there is less scope for the large differences among languages that the more extreme linguistic
relativists have imagined. But might linguistic universals leave room for less extreme versions of
linguistic relativism that are still interesting? That depends on what linguistic devices there are
and on their relationships to other cognitive mechanisms.

3.2 Modularity

From the perspective of nativist accounts of language, many of the questions about linguistic
relativity boil down to questions about the informational encapsulation of mental modules. To
say that a module is encapsulated means that other parts of the mind cannot influence its inner
workings (though they can supply it with inputs and use its outputs). What are the implications
of this for the linguistic relativist's claim that a person's language can exert a dramatic influence
on his perception and thought?

The answer may be different for perception, on the one hand, and the higher mental processes,
on the other. For example Jerry Fodor (1984) argues that there is a module (or modules) for
visual perception and that information from other parts of the mind cannot influence it in the way
that many psychologists have supposed. For example, even though I know that the two lines in
the Mller-Lyer illusion

Mller-Lyer Illusion

are the same length, I cannot help seeing the line on the left as longer than the line on the
right. I know the lengths are the same, but my visual module (or models) does not. It is
encapsulated; this information can't get through to it, so it can't influence how I see the figure. If
this is so, then linguistic information could not penetrate any vision modules, and so versions of
linguistic relativism which hold (as most do) that our language can influence how we see things
is wrong.

By contrast, Fodor holds that there is no special module for higher mental processes and, indeed,
that we are a long way from having any account of how thinking and reasoning work (e.g.,
2000). If this is right, then for all we know now, some aspects of linguistic relativism could be
right. The workings of various linguistic modules might influence thought in interesting ways.

It bears stressing that many of the issues involving cognitive architecture are vigorously
contested. Among other things, not all champions of modules see them as Fodor does. According
to them what is special about visual modules may just be that they process visual information,
not that they lack access to other kinds of information (indeed, top-down aspects of perception
suggest that they often do have such access). If this is so, there is more room for language to
influence perception and other cognitive processes than there is if modules are tightly insulated.

The dust here hasn't begun to settle, but one general moral is clear. If at least moderately strong
nativist and modular views of the mind are on the right track--and there is now certainly some
reason to think that they are--then many of the empirical issues about linguistic relativity will
translate into issues concerning the ways in which various modules can influence one another.

4. Morals for other Independent Variables: Modularity and Encapsulation

We have gone into detail about the linguistic relativity hypothesis, because the main lessons here
carry over to the study of the impact of other variables, e.g., culture, on cognition. Some of these
emerged above; others are obvious once they are noted. They are

1. Questions about the impact of a variable on cognition are empirical and causal questions.
2. Such questions can only be answered with care once we specify which aspects of an
independent variable, say culture, influence which aspects of thought and what form that
influence takes.
3. Such hypotheses can vary greatly in specificity, strength, and scope.
4. Testing a specific version of the hypothesis requires a combination of skills, including
those of a good ethnographer, linguist, and experimental psychologist.
5. A comparison of more than two cultures is needed to draw any firm conclusions.
6. The truth of specific hypotheses may turn on issues involving the modularity of mind and
the degree of modular encapsulation.
7. If the mind is highly modular, finding an influence of one aspect of language or culture of
some aspect of cognition may tell us little about the influence of other aspects of
language or culture on cognition.

These lessons are easier with some variables than with others. It is probably easiest with some
aspects of language, because a good deal is now known about many of the languages of the
world. It will often be more difficult in the case of culture, where things are more difficult to pin
down than they are in the case of language. And it will be virtually impossible when history is
the relevant variable; here much more speculative interpretations of historical documents may be
the best we can do. But the basic point remains. Relativistic claims are empirical causal claims
and they can only be settled by empirical evidence.

It is not always easy to strike the proper balance when thinking about empirical work on these
matters. On the one hand it is useful to cultivate an it-can't-be-that-simple reflex for use when
reading an isolated study or two. But on the other hand empirical investigation is the only thing
that can answer many of the difficult questions about the complex, entangled processes of
language, culture, and thought.

Return to Relativism: 1: A Framework for Relativism

Return to Relativism: 2: Dependent Variables: What is Relative?
Return to Relativism: 3: Independent Variables: Relative to What?
Return to Relativism: 4: Arguments For Relativism
Return to Relativism: 5: Arguments Against Relativism
Return to Relativism: Table of Contents

Copyright 2003 by
Chris Swoyer