Glossary
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
What is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis?
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also called linguistic relativity, asks whether and how language influences thought. A stronger claim, linguistic determinism, says language fixes what people can think.
The name refers to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Strong and weak versions
The strong version, linguistic determinism, treats language as setting the limits of thought. The weaker claim, linguistic relativity, allows language to influence thinking without completely determining it. These are different claims and require different evidence.
Example and evidence: color judgments
Winawer and colleagues reported that Russian speakers had an advantage in a task distinguishing shades of blue across a Russian-language color boundary. Martinovic and colleagues later failed to reproduce the predicted speed advantage at that boundary and found that category judgments changed with context.
Criticism and limits
The question can be tested in specific tasks, such as judging colors. Evidence that language affects one task would not establish that it controls all thought or that speakers of different languages live in incompatible perceptual worlds.
Why it matters
Language learning, cross-cultural communication, and cognitive development raise useful questions about this relationship. Does a linguistic distinction change performance on a particular task, and under what conditions?