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What is Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
(2006-12-18 20:48:20)The Sapir-Whorf theory, named after the American
linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, is a very influential but controversial theory
concerning the relationship between language, thought and
culture. What this hypothesis suggests is like this:
our language helps mould our way of
thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably
express our unique ways of understanding the world.
Following this argument, two important points could be captured in
this theory. On the one hand, language may determine our thinking
patterns; on the other, similarity between languages is relative,
the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse
their conceptualization of the world will be. For this reason, this
hypothesis has alternatively been referred to as Linguistic
Determinism and Linguistic Relativity. Nowadays, few people would
possibly tend to accept the original form of this theory
completely. Consequently, two versions of the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis have been developed, a strong version and a weak
version. The strong version of the theory refers to the claim the
original hypothesis suggests, emphasizing the decisive role of
language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version
of this hypothesis, however, is a modified type of its original
theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language,
culture and thought, but the cross-cultural differences thus
produced in our ways of thinking are relative, rather than
categorical.
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