Book review -- the language hoax

The Language Hoax by John McWhorter (2014)

One of the annoyances that comes with having some knowledge of a certain field is the exasperation one feels when reading articles in the mainstream media about that field whose authors all too obviously have only a superficial acquaintance with it.  For example, one regularly sees reports of "Earth-like" exoplanets (which are nothing of the sort), accompanied with wild speculation about possible life there, something not even remotely suggested by any actual data about whatever planet has somehow come to the writer's attention.  Almost every discovery of a new hominid fossil is announced as radically changing our ideas about human evolution, though in reality it usually fits the established picture quite well.

In the field of language, the hardy perennial of this kind of pseudo-journalism is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (sometimes just called the Whorfian hypothesis) -- the idea that different languages shape the thinking and world-views of their speakers in different ways, so that native speakers of (for example) Hopi perceive reality in some fundamentally different way than native speakers of English do.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis dates back to the 1930s and has been pretty solidly debunked within academia for decades, but every so often someone needing an idea for an article stumbles across it and writes it up as something brand-new and intriguing.  The same few clichéd examples keep popping up in such essays, such as the fact that Russian has different words for different shades of blue, Australian Aborigine languages in which speakers orient themselves by compass directions rather than terms like "behind" and "next to", etc.  This article is a good recent example.

Superficially the idea makes sense.  Anyone who ventures beyond the familiar clutch of Western languages like French, German, and Spanish will be startled at just how different the languages of the wider world -- African, Asian, Papuan, Australian aboriginal, etc. -- can be from what English-speakers regard as "normal".  Japanese often leaves the grammatical subject unspecified, so that "I go", "you go", "they go", etc. are not differentiated, but it has a system of verb endings and special verbs marking how polite the sentence is.  Persian does not mark gender in the third person (there's just one pronoun for both "he" and "she"), while Arabic does mark it in the second (there are different masculine and feminine words for "you").  In Navajo, every verb is irregular, most having forms as apparently unrelated as "go" and "went" are.  Many Amazonian Indian languages have "evidentiary grammar", obligatory grammatical markers that specify how you know whatever it is you're asserting.  And so on.  Surely all these strange features must influence how the speakers of these languages think?

In fact, this hypothesis has been tested against the data for decades, and the answer is an almost complete "no".  And John McWhorter is just the man to explain why.

First off, as he discusses in detail, experiments have found a few correlations between unusual features of certain languages and their speakers' awareness of the things those features refer to -- but those correlations are far too weak to constitute evidence of a "world-view".  Also, there are some relationships between features of languages and their speakers' culture or physical environment, but causation clearly runs the other way.  Eskimos don't pay attention to different kinds of snow because their languages have several different words for types of snow; they have those different words because their environment requires them to be aware of such distinctions.  Japanese evolved special grammar to express degrees of politeness because politeness is so important in Japanese culture, not vice-versa.

One thing many non-linguists don't realize is that extreme complexity is the norm in languages -- many, even most, of the world's thousands of minor languages display grammatical intricacies comparable to Latin or Russian, each in their own way.  Relatively simplified languages like English, Persian, and Indonesian are the oddballs (and there are reasons why the "big" languages tend to be the simplified ones).  So each language displays many "weird" features which seem significant in individual cases, when you see them cited about just one or two languages, but which in fact appear in many languages around the world.  And the distribution of such features is pretty much random.  For example, evidentiary grammar crops up in various languages all over the world, showing no correlation with whatever "world-view" that feature supposedly generates.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was originally motivated by a desire to assert hidden elements of sophistication in cultures Westerners tend to consider primitive, by claiming that their languages make them more mentally attuned to this or that than we are.  But what about languages which, by the same logic, should make their speakers less attuned to things?  What about a language with no inflection, no explicit marking of case, gender, plurals (usually), tense, subjunctivity, or definiteness, to say nothing of the even more exotic (to us) categories which the Whorfians get so excited about in non-Western languages?  Wouldn't such a language logically give its speakers a rather dull, crude, coarse-grained "world-view"?  Well, that language actually exists.  It's Chinese, the language of one of the world's most sophisticated civilizations for thousands of years.

The world's languages show a vast and fascinating range of variations, but their specific features don't condition any particular "world-view" in their speakers.  The evidence just doesn't support such a claim.