Linguistic relativism asserts that the specific language or languages you speak as a native influences and determines your cognition, perceptions, worldview and your categorisation of reality. Linguistic relativism is also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who never actually co-authored any works and never co-proposed a formal unified hypothesis. Research has materialised positive empirical evidence for a weaker version of linguistic relativity, proving therefore that people are intimately influenced by the particularities of native tongues without being bound. The word “determine” is thus perhaps inaccurate, depending on how strongly it is applied.
here is an opposing theory to linguistic relativism, the flip side, called linguistic universalism. Beyond this theory, a linguistic universal can be understood as a pattern that occurs across all languages. For example, all languages have nouns and verbs, and when spoken, consonants and vowels. The field of linguistic universals has been pioneered by two main figures: Noam Chomsky and Joseph Greenberg. Chomsky’s famous theory of universal grammar proposes that the language faculty has innate biological characteristics that allow for a degree of standardisation across the world’s languages. The most basic concept in UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language can be, from within the human language faculty. Greenberg, meanwhile, worked on identifying existing universals, successfully compiling a list of 45 basic universals covering some thirty languages. Again, it is important to understand that humans are not bound by linguistic universals, and not completely bound by relativism either. The world’s languages have been formed going by not just the only biological options for successful communication, tightly disciplined by the innate constraints in what the grammar of a possible human language can be, but instead by an intoxicating combination of vision and coordination. Languages don’t strictly have to be a certain way, universally, but are still coordinated according to what suits biological functionality and cultural vision.
Of the two, linguistic relativism has been more helpful for The Buzz-Concept Project. Indeed, linguistic universals are not strictly as essentially necessary for effective cognition as some people previously thought. They are things everyone has accepted to some extent because they are what is convenient and flattering, for the universality of human culture rather than language itself, and not because we absolutely have to, strictly speaking. For example, we have nouns because we have heartbeats, but we are not cerebrally bound by nouns, are we? It’s just what is most complementary. Existing linguistic universals are ironically most interesting to me because of how they in turn enhance differences, not universality, in the way people think according to the language they speak.
The Buzz-Concept Project 