Linguistic Relativity: A very cool concept

Linguistic Relativity…..

pinterest — odessy..

Dude, ur language even shapes the way u think. Do u believe ittt??????!!

You think you’re seeing the world objectively…..erm....no!!……you’re actually seeing a version filtered by your first language.

Sooo, we’re talking about the THE Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, named after the American anthropologist and linguist, Edward Sapir, and his student, American linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf.

What intrigued me into this very geeky concept is that they said, “Our language plays a role in our cognitive thinking.” What? Remind u, it’s a controversial topic.

They didn’t say that u speak this language ur dumb and u speak that ur very smart. No, they just hypothesized that, hey, language might influence what input we take from the world, how we process it, and what’s gonna be the output.

I thought logic was universal. 2+2=4 everywhere, isnt it? IG NOT!! Gotta dig deeper now.

Linguistic relativity, the generally more accepted version that went through several criticisms and analyses in the recent decades, suggests that the language we speak influences the way we perceive the world on a daily basis, both emotionally and logically.

For instance while we generally say right, left, back, and forth to show directions, some cultures say east, west, north, and south even in everyday conversations.

So instead of them saying you’ll find the store to ur left, they will be saying that the store is on the east like they have known for life where’s east.

But then how do they always know where’s east when, for me to find east, I’m gonna have to open the compass in my phone.

Trust me, if Google gave me north and east for directions, there’s a good possibility that I’d be in the middle of some forest waiting to be eaten by the feral beasts. :)

So what they said is whatever language we’ve learnt from our childhood shapes the way we take in information from our surroundings.

It’s actually more about what your brain is trained to notice without you even realizing it.

Let’s take colors, for example.

When u say brown, some ppl might have several shades of brown in their heads like beige, cream, cocoa, sand, espresso, and many more while I might only have light, dark, and the classic brown in mine according to my first language.

They can spot the difference better than me, faster than me. So, What I casually call “brown,” someone else might be seeing as multiple different colors.

This is where the initial Whorf’s theory is refined and called the theory of linguistic relativity, that language may not necessarily mess with ur IQ, but definitely nudges it.

Hence, we now know that 2+2=4 everywhere and “sapir whrof” suggests that language influences attention and categorization and not logic.

The theory of linguistic relativity suggests that the language, how vast and detailed it is, definitely messes with ur way of thinking a little.

Korzybski (Alfred Korzybski ,Polish-American philosopher) independently described a “strong” version of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity.

He said, “We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of semantic reactions and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us.”

So yeah, maybe i’m not dumb… My language just didn’t prepare me for east and west :)

but ……what else did my language trick me into thinking then?!!