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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Whorfian Hypothesis

Introduction, general overviews and foundational texts.

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• Counterfactual Reasoning
• Theory of Mind

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• Cognitive Anthropology
• Edward Sapir
• Ethnocentrism
• Ethnoscience
• Language and Urban Place
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Relativity

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Whorfian Hypothesis by Daniel Casasanto LAST REVIEWED: 11 January 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 11 January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0058

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (a.k.a. the Whorfian hypothesis) concerns the relationship between language and thought. Neither the anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (b. 1884–d. 1939) nor his student Benjamin Whorf (b. 1897–d. 1941) ever formally stated any single hypothesis about the influence of language on nonlinguistic cognition and perception. On the basis of their writings, however, two proposals emerged, generating decades of controversy among anthropologists, linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. According to the more radical proposal, linguistic determinism , the languages that people speak rigidly determine the way they perceive and understand the world. On the more moderate proposal, linguistic relativity , habits of using language influence habits of thinking. As a result, people who speak different languages think differently in predictable ways. During the latter half of the 20th century, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was widely regarded as false. Around the turn of the 21st century, however, experimental evidence reopened debate about the extent to which language shapes nonlinguistic cognition and perception. Scientific tests of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity help to clarify what is universal in the human mind and what depends on the particulars of people’s physical and social experience.

Writing on the relationship between language and thought predates Sapir and Whorf, and extends beyond the academy. The 19th-century German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that language constrains people’s worldview, foreshadowing the idea of linguistic determinism later articulated in Sapir 1929 and Whorf 1956 ( Humboldt 1988 ). The intuition that language radically determines thought has been explored in works of fiction such as Orwell’s dystopian fantasy 1984 ( Orwell 1949 ). Although there is little empirical support for radical linguistic determinism, more moderate forms of linguistic relativity continue to generate influential research, reviewed from an anthropologist’s perspective in Lucy 1997 , from a psychologist’s perspective in Hunt and Agnoli 1991 , and discussed from multidisciplinary perspectives in Gumperz and Levinson 1996 and Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003 .

Gentner, Dedre, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, eds. 2003. Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Edited volume containing position papers for and against linguistic relativity. Includes reviews of some of the experimental studies that revived widespread interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at the beginning of the 21st century.

Gumperz, John J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 1996. Rethinking linguistic relativity . Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 17. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Edited volume containing position papers for and against linguistic relativity. A cross-section of Whorfian research in anthropology, psychology, and linguistics at the end of the 20th century.

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1988. On language: The diversity of human language-structure and its influence on the mental development of mankind . Translated by Peter Heath. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Humboldt argues that language determines one’s world view.

Hunt, Earl, and Franca Agnoli. 1991. The Whorfian hypothesis: A cognitive psychology perspective. Psychological Review 98.3: 377–389.

DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.98.3.377

A critical review of 20th-century Whorfian research, in which the authors sketch proposals for several studies that were brought to fruition by other researchers over the ensuing two decades.

Lucy, John A. 1997. Linguistic relativity. Annual Review of Anthropology 26:291–312.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.291

A review focusing on the various ways in which the Whorfian question was approached empirically during the 20th century.

Orwell, George. 1949. 1984: A novel . New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Fictitious account of a totalitarian state in which language is used to control thought.

Sapir, E. 1929. The status of linguistics as a science. Language 5:207–214.

DOI: 10.2307/409588

Sapir states the view that language shapes one’s worldview, subsequently called linguistic determinism.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf . Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The definitive collection of Whorf’s writings, some posthumously published.

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The ethnologist Frances Densmore, working for the Bureau of American Ethnology, and Mountain Chief, a Blackfoot leader. Photo from 1916 . Courtesy the Library of Congress

Our language, our world

Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. is it true history shines a light.

by James McElvenny   + BIO

Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.

There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?

T he roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century. Enlightenment discussions were often couched in terms of the ‘genius’ of a language, an expression first coined in French as le génie de la langue . The term was used in a wide variety of senses, to the point where it was often not clear what precisely was meant. One contemporary commentator remarked: ‘[W]e often ask what is the genius of a language, and it is difficult to say.’ What we can say is that the genius of a language was understood as representing its distinct character, the je ne sais quoi that constitutes the idiomatic in each idiom. This unique character was frequently taken to embody something of the national mentality of the speakers of a language.

A classic – and highly influential – formulation came in 1772 with the Treatise on the Origin of Language by the German philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). In opposition to contemporaries who saw the ultimate origins of human language in animal cries, Herder insisted that there is a difference in kind between human and animal communication. Human language, so Herder argued, rests on the irreducible human capacity for ‘reflection’ ( Besonnenheit ), our ability to recognise and think about our own thoughts. In coining our words, we reflect on the properties of the things they name, and choose the most salient of these. Different peoples will have focused on different properties, with the result that each language with its characteristic forms will encapsulate a slightly different perspective on the world. As languages are passed on from generation to generation, the differences between them accumulate, making the languages and the worldviews they contain more and more distinct. In order to understand the unique perspective of each language, we must trace the forms of words back to their etymological origins.

The Herderian thread was picked up in the early 19th century and woven most expertly into a broader account of language and literature by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt endorsed an element of linguistic determinism – that is, that language not only reflects a particular worldview but is actively involved in shaping it: ‘Language,’ he wrote , ‘is the forming organ of thought.’ The relationship he envisaged, however, was not one-way but dialectic. Between language and thought there inheres an endless feedback loop: our thoughts shape our words, and our words shape our thoughts. His account was not restricted to individual words – more important were the grammatical structures exhibited in the languages of the world. But even the study of grammar was only a preliminary to the real task, according to Humboldt. Grammar and vocabulary merely represent the ‘dead skeleton’ of a language. To capture its character, to see its ‘living structure’, we must appreciate its literature, the use made of the language by its most eloquent speakers and writers.

The inner form of a language, Steinthal believed, was the perfect window to the national mind

Despite Humboldt’s exhortations to seek the life of language in literature, his successors in the 19th century concentrated on devising classifications of languages revolving around their grammatical features. The goal was often described as identifying the ‘inner form’ of each language. ‘Inner form’ was a term used by Humboldt (although only fleetingly) to refer to the underlying structure and organisation of a language, as opposed to its ‘outer form’, the externally perceptible features of its words, grammar and sound system. Humboldt’s inner form carries forward the concerns of the Enlightenment’s genius of a language, while the outer form consists of the pedantic details of noun declensions, verb conjugations, regular sound substitutions and so on.

Many scholars working in Humboldt’s wake adopted his ‘inner form’ and developed it in different directions, although the most prominent version of this notion was that elaborated by Heymann Steinthal (1823-99). Inner form served as the centrepiece of Steinthal’s classification of languages, which in turn lay at the heart of his Völkerpsychologie , the ‘psychology of peoples’ or ‘ethnopsychology’. The overarching aim of Völkerpsychologie was to describe the supposed shared mentality of each nation. The inner form of a language, so believed Steinthal, was the perfect window to this national mind.

But during the course of the 19th century, talk of national minds and the character of languages fell out of fashion in the academic study of language. In this period, comparative-historical grammar became established as the premier field of linguistics. This is the approach that carefully compares words and grammatical forms across languages in order to chart their historical changes and identify their putative genealogical relations. Comparative-historical linguistics tells us, for example, that French, Italian and Spanish are all descended from Latin; that Hindi-Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi can trace their ancestry to Sanskrit; and that all these languages, along with many others traditionally spoken from western Europe to northern India, are part of the extended Indo-European family.

The hypothetical progenitor of this great family, Proto-Indo-European, has been lost to time, but elements of its vocabulary, grammar and sound system can be reconstructed from the traits of its descendants. Crucially, these are all aspects of the ‘outer form’ of languages – and the linguists who investigated these outer forms preferred to describe the historical transmutations they studied in terms of ‘sound laws’. Sound laws are mere statements of fact, that a sound attested in a certain phonetic environment in a parent language changes into other sounds in its descendants. Such accounts avoid invoking any hidden, underlying explanatory principles. Most comparative-historical grammarians believed that, for linguistics to be considered a serious science, it must limit itself to solid, objectively observable data. Uncovering the inner life of languages, capturing their characters and connections to thought and culture, were at best seen as future tasks for a thoroughly grounded science of language. At worst, they were taken to be nothing more than idle metaphysical speculation.

In what was the last gasp of the Humboldtian tradition in academic linguistics of the 19th century, the sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-93) proposed a new subfield of ‘typology’, which would exhaustively survey the grammatical features of the world’s languages in order to discover the ‘typical traits, the ruling tendencies’ that determine linguistic structure. This undertaking would provide an empirical foundation for the ‘highest task’ of linguistics, explaining such structural tendencies as manifestations of the national mind. Gabelentz’s call for the new field fell on deaf ears in this age dominated by historical-comparative grammar. Typology would re-emerge as a mainstream pursuit in linguistics only in the early 20th century.

I n this same period, on the other side of the Atlantic, questions of mind and language did enjoy currency in a Humboldtian-inflected anthropology. Franz Boas (1858-1942), the ‘father’ of American anthropology, set out to compile the definitive compendium of the Indigenous languages of North America in his multi-volume Handbook of American Indian Languages , the first volume of which appeared in 1911. The grammatical descriptions contained in Boas’s handbook were to ‘depend entirely upon the inner form of each language’. ‘In other words,’ Boas elaborated, ‘the grammar has been treated as though an intelligent Indian was going to develop the forms of his own thoughts by an analysis of his own form of speech.’

But Boas was beset by an ambivalence about the implications of the mind-language nexus. Nineteenth-century discourse on the differences between nations was all too often predicated on an assumed hierarchy of humanity. There was a widespread belief that the peoples extant in the world today had reached different stages of evolution in their societies and cultures – and that this was attributable to differences in their cognitive abilities. At the top of the hierarchy was 19th-century European man, who had unfolded his mental powers in all directions, while at the bottom were the various Indigenous peoples of the world, usually believed to be stuck in an eternal childhood of humanity or to have degenerated from a previous state of ‘civilisation’.

Attitudes were not monolithic: there were many different schemes of human social, cultural and cognitive evolution in this period, admitting of many nuances. But even such figures as Humboldt, Steinthal and Gabelentz, who revelled in human diversity and praised the uniqueness of each language, were more partial to some languages than to others. American languages, argued Steinthal, actually have no inner form. The indisputably complex constructions attested in their grammars are merely mash-ups of concrete conceptual material without any underlying formal structure. Attitudes at the time among the leading anthropologists and linguists in the United States were even more extreme.

Anthropologists continued to consider possible connections between language and mind

Boas pushed back against such prejudiced schemes. He actually agreed with his opponents about the existence of some alleged deficits in Indigenous languages, but refused to see these as an index of mental development. Many American languages lack abstract terms and indefinitely large numbers, conceded Boas, but this is not because their speakers are incapable of grasping such concepts. It is simply the case that they have never had need to talk in abstract terms or count to higher numbers, and so have never had occasion to produce such forms in their languages. If this need arose, their languages would soon adapt.

Boas’s views were largely inspired by the teachings of his former mentor in Berlin, the ethnographer Adolf Bastian (1826-1905). Bastian advocated the principle of the ‘psychic unity of mankind’, the idea that all humans, no matter what their ancestry or their present cultural condition, have at base the same mental faculties and abilities. The apparently differing ‘ethnic thoughts’ of the various peoples of the world are merely different arrangements of the same ‘elementary thoughts’ common to all humanity. The human mind is essentially the same everywhere.

We therefore see in the 19th century a clear arc in the development of academic attitudes towards linguistic relativity. At the beginning of the century, linguistic relativity was a respectable position in the study of language, buoyed by the writings of such figures as Herder and Humboldt. But as the century wore on, academic linguistics became increasingly dominated by the school of comparative-historical grammarians, whose approach was highly technical and empirical in character. In this intellectual environment, linguists gradually turned away from the seemingly nebulous questions about the underlying conceptual apparatuses of languages. Anthropologists, by contrast, continued throughout the 19th century to consider possible connections between language and mind, but the hierarchical terms in which their discussions were often framed came under criticism towards the end of the century, in a movement spearheaded by Boas.

T he latter-day ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ is in many respects a continuation of the 19th-century debates. Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) were heirs to the Humboldtian tradition. Sapir was steeped in German language scholarship: his Master’s thesis was on Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language . He was also one of Boas’s most talented and devoted pupils, and perpetuated his teacher’s positions. ‘Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven,’ wrote Sapir in 1921, ‘are, in a sense, one and the same.’ But, like Boas, he insisted that there are no ‘significant racial differences’ in thought across the human species, and no direct connections between culture and language. It is therefore impossible to infer alleged evolutionary stages from language structure: ‘When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.’

Despite the desire to extricate his research from the prejudices of past scholarship, Sapir was still invested in the project of analysing the grammatical ‘processes’ and ‘concepts’ attested in the languages of the world in order to identify the ‘type or plan or structural “genius”’ of each language. But this endeavour was tempered by a belief in the at least partial autonomy of linguistic form. On Sapir’s account, every language possesses an ‘inner phonetic system’ and ‘a definite feeling for patterning on the level of grammatical formation’, both of which ‘operate as such, regardless of the need for expressing particular concepts or of giving external shape to particular groups of concepts.’ Language, it would seem, was not quite so stuck in those thought-grooves.

Treating linguistic form as in some way autonomous was implicit in the 19th-century comparative-historical grammarians’ postulation of sound laws. In the 20th century, an explicit move was made by many linguists to hive off language structure as their private domain, an object they could investigate independently of any broader questions of cognition or the physical production and reception of speech. In these years, the Genevan linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) introduced a distinction between la langue (language) and la parole (speech), a distinction that has become fundamental to much subsequent linguistic scholarship. La langue is the abstract, self-contained system of each language, while la parole is the use of la langue to create actual utterances. Linguists, argued Saussure, should describe the properties of each langue without worrying about how it is instantiated in the minds and mouths of speakers. These are problems for the neighbouring sciences of psychology, physiology and physics. Sapir’s avowal of the formal autonomy of languages can be understood as part of this trend, even though at the same time he clearly did not wish to entirely relinquish his Humboldtian heritage, with its psychological and anthropological concerns.

There was a desire to break the spell of language, to revolt against its tyranny

But what about the linguistic determinism of the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Although neither Sapir nor Whorf ever formulated any precise, testable proposition postulating the influence of language on thought, they certainly envisaged such effects. In 1929, Sapir wrote:

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 … The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Sapir and Whorf’s rhetoric answered to a contemporary moral panic about the use and abuse of language. The young 20th century saw public discourse perverted by new forms of propaganda, disseminated by such new technologies as radio and film, all of which accompanied and facilitated the catastrophic upheavals of the First World War and the political polarisation that resulted in the rise of totalitarian governments across Europe. There was a desire to break the spell of language, to revolt against its tyranny supporting irrationality and barbarity, and make it the servant of enlightened thought. This sentiment found expression in, among other places, the linguistic turn taken by the incipient analytic philosophy of this period. At the popularising end of the spectrum, innumerable manuals on meaning appeared, such as The Meaning of Meaning (1923) by C K Ogden and I A Richards, Science and Sanity (1933) by Alfred Korzybski, and The Tyranny of Words (1938) by Stuart Chase. This is the world of Orwell’s Newspeak, in which language is the master of mind.

Sapir and Whorf eagerly advertised the contribution their field of linguistics could make to solving these problems. In revealing the diversity of realities created by languages, linguistics could help to expose how language misleads us. In 1924, Sapir wrote:

Perhaps the best way to get behind our thought processes and to eliminate from them all the accidents or irrelevances due to their linguistic garb is to plunge into the study of exotic modes of expression. At any rate, I know of no better way to kill spurious ‘entities’.

B y the mid-20th century, language-critical discourse had died down and academic linguistics largely returned to the dispassionate scientism familiar from the end of the previous century. Assessing several claimed cases of links between language structure and culture across a diverse range of languages, the US linguist Joseph Greenberg (1915-2001) declared mid-century: ‘[O]ne does not find any underlying semantic patterns such as would be required for the semantic system of a language to reflect some over-all world view of a metaphysical nature.’

Greenberg was inspired by the work of Boas and Sapir, and reignited the torch of linguistic typology that had been raised up by Gabelentz at the end of the 19th century. Greenberg’s continuation of the old Humboldtian project of investigating the structural diversity of the world’s languages while disavowing any connection between structure and cognition or culture was decisive for the later development of typological theory. What for Gabelentz had been the ‘highest task’ of language research was now officially off limits in the last corner of linguistics concerned with capturing and comparing the grammatical character of languages.

Interest in diversity was in any case at a low point in the mid-20th century. In his pursuit of ‘universal grammar’, Noam Chomsky (1928-) strove to re-establish a kind of psychic unity of mankind. The differences between individual languages, on Chomsky’s account, are mere phantoms, superficial variations on the same underlying system produced by an innate faculty of language shared by all humans. The linguist’s task should not be to meticulously catalogue these variants, but to factor them out and discover the universal principles governing all languages. Following Chomsky’s lead, received opinion in most quarters of academic research maintained this fastidious separation of language and thought until the end of the 20th century.

But linguistic relativity would not suffer banishment. Linguists and psychologists who could not ignore these questions have brought relativity back into the academic mainstream and delivered solid results. To name just one example, in ongoing, cutting-edge work, researchers have shown that certain languages may allow their speakers to unlock senses that are the common possession of all humans but remain unutilised by most people. In English and many other languages, spatial location is usually described in egocentric terms. If a fly were to land on my leg, I might say: ‘A fly has landed on the right side of my leg.’ Right is an egocentric spatial term that orients objects in the world according to an imaginary left-right axis projected from my body.

We are all, in a sense, compasses. English speakers are, mostly, not consciously aware of this

However, this is not the only way we can conceptualise space. In the Gurindji language, spoken in northern Australia – as in many other languages of the world – locations are usually described using the cardinal directions north, south, east and west. Assuming that I am sitting so my right leg is oriented towards the west, the equivalent sentence in Gurindji would be: ‘ Karlarnimpalnginyi nyawama wurturrjima, walngin ngayinyja wurturrjila .’ Literally: ‘This is the outer upper west of (my) leg. The fly landed here on my leg.’ If I were to turn around and face the opposite direction, the fly would still – in egocentric terms – be on the right side of my leg, but a Gurindji speaker would point out that – in cardinal terms – the fly is now on the eastern part of my leg. While my private left-right axis might follow me around dutifully, the earth will always stand still.

The cardinal directions are not unknown in English, but they are typically employed only when talking on a geographical scale. By contrast, in Gurindji, even parts of the speaker’s body are located in a world-spanning co-ordinate system. Most English speakers would be at a loss to even identify the cardinal directions without the aid of a compass. How do Gurindji speakers do it? It would seem that they draw on a number of environmental cues, chief among these the course of the sun through the sky. But human neurophysiology is also sensitive to the magnetic field of Earth: the human brain responds in measurable ways to ambient magnetic fields. We are all, in a sense, compasses. English speakers are for the most part not consciously aware of this, even though their brain activity changes when surrounding magnetic fields are manipulated under experimental conditions. Recent experiments by the Australian linguist Felicity Meakins and her collaborators have shown that some Gurindji speakers can reliably report on shifts in ambient magnetic fields.

Gurindji speakers’ habit of using cardinal directions would seem to have opened up their powers of perception. At least some Gurindji speakers may be able to consciously feel Earth’s magnetic field. But do English speakers and Gurindji speakers live in ‘distinct worlds’, as Sapir would have it? Having greater sensitivity to some features of the environment still seems like something less than the all-encompassing, incommensurable worldviews of the Humboldtian tradition.

This is perhaps the chief source of the continuing scepticism regarding linguistic relativity in many academic quarters. We start with a feeling, an ineffable je ne sais quoi , that our language shapes our world. But to assess the truth of this claim, the scientist wants a hypothesis – a rigorous, experimentally testable statement of precisely how language shapes our world. Quasi-mystical meditations on my life in language are not the stuff of modern scientific journals. But any properly formulated hypothesis will necessarily be reductive and deflationary – devising empirical tests of the supposed differences in our worldviews inevitably means transforming our innermost feelings into detached, foreign objects that we can observe and analyse from the outside. Such tests can arguably never capture the totality and primordiality of the original feeling.

Does this mean that the scholarship of previous centuries has no place in today’s world or, alternatively, that modern science simply cannot fathom the philosophical depths explored by earlier work? Past and present scholarship are complementary. The writings of earlier scholars – however speculative they may seem to us now, and whatever problematic assumptions they may be built upon – undeniably capture something of our human experience and can inform the investigations of present-day researchers. In turn, the hypotheses and experiments of latter-day linguists and psychologists provide another perspective – shaped by the scientistic worldview of our own era – on these enduring questions of the connections between mind and language. In all these cases, we cannot even make sense of the questions without understanding something of the specific intellectual contexts in which they have arisen.

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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: How Language Influences How We Express Ourselves

Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

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What to Know About the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Real-world examples of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativity in psychology.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the language a person speaks can influence their worldview, thought, and even how they experience and understand the world.

While more extreme versions of the hypothesis have largely been discredited, a growing body of research has demonstrated that language can meaningfully shape how we understand the world around us and even ourselves.

Keep reading to learn more about linguistic relativity, including some real-world examples of how it shapes thoughts, emotions, and behavior.  

The hypothesis is named after anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. While the hypothesis is named after them both, the two never actually formally co-authored a coherent hypothesis together.

This Hypothesis Aims to Figure Out How Language and Culture Are Connected

Sapir was interested in charting the difference in language and cultural worldviews, including how language and culture influence each other. Whorf took this work on how language and culture shape each other a step further to explore how different languages might shape thought and behavior.

Since then, the concept has evolved into multiple variations, some more credible than others.

Linguistic Determinism Is an Extreme Version of the Hypothesis

Linguistic determinism, for example, is a more extreme version suggesting that a person’s perception and thought are limited to the language they speak. An early example of linguistic determinism comes from Whorf himself who argued that the Hopi people in Arizona don’t conjugate verbs into past, present, and future tenses as English speakers do and that their words for units of time (like “day” or “hour”) were verbs rather than nouns.

From this, he concluded that the Hopi don’t view time as a physical object that can be counted out in minutes and hours the way English speakers do. Instead, Whorf argued, the Hopi view time as a formless process.

This was then taken by others to mean that the Hopi don’t have any concept of time—an extreme view that has since been repeatedly disproven.

There is some evidence for a more nuanced version of linguistic relativity, which suggests that the structure and vocabulary of the language you speak can influence how you understand the world around you. To understand this better, it helps to look at real-world examples of the effects language can have on thought and behavior.

Different Languages Express Colors Differently

Color is one of the most common examples of linguistic relativity. Most known languages have somewhere between two and twelve color terms, and the way colors are categorized varies widely. In English, for example, there are distinct categories for blue and green .

Blue and Green

But in Korean, there is one word that encompasses both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see blue, it just means blue is understood as a variant of green rather than a distinct color category all its own.

In Russian, meanwhile, the colors that English speakers would lump under the umbrella term of “blue” are further subdivided into two distinct color categories, “siniy” and “goluboy.” They roughly correspond to light blue and dark blue in English. But to Russian speakers, they are as distinct as orange and brown .

In one study comparing English and Russian speakers, participants were shown a color square and then asked to choose which of the two color squares below it was the closest in shade to the first square.

The test specifically focused on varying shades of blue ranging from “siniy” to “goluboy.” Russian speakers were not only faster at selecting the matching color square but were more accurate in their selections.

The Way Location Is Expressed Varies Across Languages

This same variation occurs in other areas of language. For example, in Guugu Ymithirr, a language spoken by Aboriginal Australians, spatial orientation is always described in absolute terms of cardinal directions. While an English speaker would say the laptop is “in front of” you, a Guugu Ymithirr speaker would say it was north, south, west, or east of you.

As a result, Aboriginal Australians have to be constantly attuned to cardinal directions because their language requires it (just as Russian speakers develop a more instinctive ability to discern between shades of what English speakers call blue because their language requires it).

So when you ask a Guugu Ymithirr speaker to tell you which way south is, they can point in the right direction without a moment’s hesitation. Meanwhile, most English speakers would struggle to accurately identify South without the help of a compass or taking a moment to recall grade school lessons about how to find it.

The concept of these cardinal directions exists in English, but English speakers aren’t required to think about or use them on a daily basis so it’s not as intuitive or ingrained in how they orient themselves in space.

Just as with other aspects of thought and perception, the vocabulary and grammatical structure we have for thinking about or talking about what we feel doesn’t create our feelings, but it does shape how we understand them and, to an extent, how we experience them.

Words Help Us Put a Name to Our Emotions

For example, the ability to detect displeasure from a person’s face is universal. But in a language that has the words “angry” and “sad,” you can further distinguish what kind of displeasure you observe in their facial expression. This doesn’t mean humans never experienced anger or sadness before words for them emerged. But they may have struggled to understand or explain the subtle differences between different dimensions of displeasure.

In one study of English speakers, toddlers were shown a picture of a person with an angry facial expression. Then, they were given a set of pictures of people displaying different expressions including happy, sad, surprised, scared, disgusted, or angry. Researchers asked them to put all the pictures that matched the first angry face picture into a box.

The two-year-olds in the experiment tended to place all faces except happy faces into the box. But four-year-olds were more selective, often leaving out sad or fearful faces as well as happy faces. This suggests that as our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

But some research suggests the influence is not limited to just developing a wider vocabulary for categorizing emotions. Language may “also help constitute emotion by cohering sensations into specific perceptions of ‘anger,’ ‘disgust,’ ‘fear,’ etc.,” said Dr. Harold Hong, a board-certified psychiatrist at New Waters Recovery in North Carolina.

As our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

Words for emotions, like words for colors, are an attempt to categorize a spectrum of sensations into a handful of distinct categories. And, like color, there’s no objective or hard rule on where the boundaries between emotions should be which can lead to variation across languages in how emotions are categorized.

Emotions Are Categorized Differently in Different Languages

Just as different languages categorize color a little differently, researchers have also found differences in how emotions are categorized. In German, for example, there’s an emotion called “gemütlichkeit.”

While it’s usually translated as “cozy” or “ friendly ” in English, there really isn’t a direct translation. It refers to a particular kind of peace and sense of belonging that a person feels when surrounded by the people they love or feel connected to in a place they feel comfortable and free to be who they are.

Harold Hong, MD, Psychiatrist

The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion.

You may have felt gemütlichkeit when staying up with your friends to joke and play games at a sleepover. You may feel it when you visit home for the holidays and spend your time eating, laughing, and reminiscing with your family in the house you grew up in.

In Japanese, the word “amae” is just as difficult to translate into English. Usually, it’s translated as "spoiled child" or "presumed indulgence," as in making a request and assuming it will be indulged. But both of those have strong negative connotations in English and amae is a positive emotion .

Instead of being spoiled or coddled, it’s referring to that particular kind of trust and assurance that comes with being nurtured by someone and knowing that you can ask for what you want without worrying whether the other person might feel resentful or burdened by your request.

You might have felt amae when your car broke down and you immediately called your mom to pick you up, without having to worry for even a second whether or not she would drop everything to help you.

Regardless of which languages you speak, though, you’re capable of feeling both of these emotions. “The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion,” Dr. Hong explained.

What This Means For You

“While having the words to describe emotions can help us better understand and regulate them, it is possible to experience and express those emotions without specific labels for them.” Without the words for these feelings, you can still feel them but you just might not be able to identify them as readily or clearly as someone who does have those words. 

Rhee S. Lexicalization patterns in color naming in Korean . In: Raffaelli I, Katunar D, Kerovec B, eds. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. Vol 78. John Benjamins Publishing Company; 2019:109-128. Doi:10.1075/sfsl.78.06rhe

Winawer J, Witthoft N, Frank MC, Wu L, Wade AR, Boroditsky L. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104(19):7780-7785.  10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Lindquist KA, MacCormack JK, Shablack H. The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism . Front Psychol. 2015;6. Doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00444

By Rachael Green Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Examples, Definition, Criticisms

Gregory Paul C. (MA)

Gregory Paul C. is a licensed social studies educator, and has been teaching the social sciences in some capacity for 13 years. He currently works at university in an international liberal arts department teaching cross-cultural studies in the Chuugoku Region of Japan. Additionally, he manages semester study abroad programs for Japanese students, and prepares them for the challenges they may face living in various countries short term.

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Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

Developed in 1929 by Edward Sapir, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (also known as linguistic relativity ) states that a person’s perception of the world around them and how they experience the world is both determined and influenced by the language that they speak.

The theory proposes that differences in grammatical and verbal structures, and the nuanced distinctions in the meanings that are assigned to words, create a unique reality for the speaker. We also call this idea the linguistic determinism theory .

Spair-Whorf Hypothesis Definition and Overview

Cibelli et al. (2016) reiterate the tenets of the hypothesis by stating:

“…our thoughts are shaped by our native language, and that speakers of different languages therefore think differently”(para. 1).

Kay & Kempton (1984) explain it a bit more succinctly. They explain that the hypothesis itself is based on the:

“…evolutionary view prevalent in 19 th century anthropology based in both linguistic relativity and determinism” (pp. 66, 79).

Linguist Edward Sapir, an American linguist who was interested in anthropology , studied at Yale University with Benjamin Whorf in the 1920’s.

Sapir & Whorf began to consider lexical and grammatical patterns and how these factored into the construction of different culture’s views of the world around them.

For example, they compared how thoughts and behavior differed between English speakers and Hopi language speakers in regard to the concept of time, arguing that in the Hopi language, the absence of the future tense has significant relevance (Kay & Kempton, 1984, p. 78-79).

Whorf (2021), in his own words, asserts:

“Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness” (p. 252).

10 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Examples

• Constructions of food in language: A language may ascribe many words to explain the same concept, item, or food type. This shows that they perceive it as extremely important in their society, in comparison to a culture whose language only has one word for that same concept, item, or food.
• Descriptions of color in language: Different cultures may visually perceive colors in different ways according to how the colors are described by the words in their language.
• Constructions of gender in language: Many languages are “gendered”, creating word associations that pertain to the roles of men or women in society.
• Perceptions of time in language: Depending upon how the tenses are structured in a language, it may dictate how the people that speak that language perceive the concept of time.
• Categorization in language: The ways concepts and items in a given culture are categorized (and what words are assigned to them) can affect the speaker’s perception of the world around them.
• Politeness is encoded in language: Levels of politeness in a language and the pronoun combinations to express these levels differ between languages. How languages express politeness with words can dictate how they perceive the world around them.
• Indigenous words for snow: A popular example used to justify this hypothesis is the Inuit people, who have a multitude of ways to express the word snow. If you follow the reasoning of Sapir, it would suggest that the Inuits have a profoundly deeper understanding of snow than other cultures.
• Use of idioms in language: An expression or well-known saying in one culture has an acute meaning implicitly understood by those that speak the particular language but is not understandable when expressed in another language.
• Values are engrained in language: Each country and culture have beliefs and values as a direct result of the language it uses. 
• Slang in language: The slang used by younger people evolves from generation to generation in all languages. Generational slang carries with it perceptions and ideas about the world that members of that generation share.

See Other Hypothesis Examples Here

Two Ways Language Shapes Perception

1. perception of categories and categorization.

How concepts and items in a culture are categorized (and what words are assigned to them) can affect the speaker’s perception of the world around them.

Although the examples of this phenomenon are too numerous to cite, a clear example is the extremely contextual, nuanced, and hyper-categorized Japanese language.

In the English language, the concept of “you” and “I” is narrowed to these two forms. However, Japanese has numerous ways to express you and I, each having various levels of politeness and appropriateness in relation to age, gender, and stature in society.

While in common conversation, the pronoun is often left out of the conversation – reliant on context, misuse or omission of the proper pronoun can be perceived as rude or ill-mannered.

In other ways, the complexity of the categorical lexicons can often leave English speakers puzzled. This could come in the form of classifications of different shaped bowls and plates that serve different functions; it could be traces of the ancient Japanese calendar from the 7 th Century, that possessed 72 micro-seasons during a year, or any number of sub-divided word listings that may be considered as one blanket term in another language.

Masuda et al. (2017) gives a clear example:

“ People conceptualize objects along the lines drawn between existing categories in their native language. That is, if two concepts fall into the same linguistic category, the perception of similarity between these objects would be stronger than if the two concepts fall into different linguistic categories.”

They then go on to give the example of how Japanese vs English speakers might categorize an everyday object – the bell:

“For example, in Japanese, the kind of bell found in a bell tower generally corresponds to the word kane—a large bell—which is categorically different from a small bell, suzu. However, in English, these two objects are considered to belong within the same linguistic category, “bell.” Therefore, we might expect English speakers to perceive these two objects as being more similar than would Japanese speakers (para 5).

2. Perception of the Concept of Time

According to a way the tenses are structured in a language, it may dictate how the people that speak that language perceive the concept of time

One of Sapir’s most famous applications of his theory is to the language of the Arizona Native American Hopi tribe.

He claimed, although refuted vehemently by linguistic scholars since, that they have no general notion of time – that they cannot decipher between the past, present, or future because of the grammatical structures that are used within their language.

As Engle (2016) asserts, Sapir believed that the Hopi language “encodes on ordinal value, rather than a passage of time”.

He concluded that, “a day followed by a night is not so much a new day, but a return to daylight” (p. 96).

However, it is not only Hopi culture that has different perception of time imbedded in the language; Thai culture has a non-linear concept of time, and the Malagasy people of Madagascar believe that time in motion around human beings, not that human beings are passing through time (Engle, 2016, p. 99).

Criticism of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

1. language as context-dependent.

Iwamoto (2005) expresses that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis fails to recognize that language is used within context. Its purely decontextualized textual analysis of language is too one-dimensional and doesn’t consider how we actually use language:

“Whorf’s “neat and simplistic” linguistic relativism presupposes the idea that an entire language or entire societies or cultures are categorizable or typable in a straightforward, discrete, and total manner, ignoring other variables such as contextual and semantic factors .” (Iwamoto, 2005, p. 95)

2. Not universally applicable

Another criticism of the hypothesis is that Sapir & Whorf’s hypothesis cannot be transferred or applied to all languages.

It is difficult to cite empirical studies that confirm that other cultures do not also have similarities in the way concepts are perceived through their language – even if they don’t possess a similar word/expression for a particular concept that is expressed.

3. thoughts can be independent of language

Stephen Pinker, one of Sapir & Whorf’s most emphatic critics, would argue that language is not of our thoughts, and is not a cultural invention that creates perceptions; it is in his opinion, a part of human biology (Meier & Pinker, 1995, pp. 611-612).

He suggests that the acquisition and development of sign language show that languages are instinctual, therefore biological; he even goes so far as to say that “all speech is an illusion”(p. 613).

Cibelli, E., Xu, Y., Austerweil, J. L., Griffiths, T. L., & Regier, T. (2016). The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference: Evidence from the Domain of Color.  PLOS ONE ,  11 (7), e0158725.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158725

Engle, J. S. (2016). Of Hopis and Heptapods: The Return of Sapir-Whorf.  ETC.: A Review of General Semantics ,  73 (1), 95.  https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-544562276/of-hopis-and-heptapods-the-return-of-sapir-whorf

Iwamoto, N. (2005). The Role of Language in Advancing Nationalism.  Bulletin of the Institute of Humanities ,  38 , 91–113.

Meier, R. P., & Pinker, S. (1995). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.  Language ,  71 (3), 610.  https://doi.org/10.2307/416234

Masuda, T., Ishii, K., Miwa, K., Rashid, M., Lee, H., & Mahdi, R. (2017). One Label or Two? Linguistic Influences on the Similarity Judgment of Objects between English and Japanese Speakers. Frontiers in Psychology , 8 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01637

Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?  American Anthropologist ,  86 (1), 65–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/679389

Whorf, B. L. (2021).  Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf . Hassell Street Press.

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