Editing Linguistic relativity (section)

== History ==

The idea was first expressed explicitly by 19th-century thinkers such as [[Wilhelm von Humboldt]] and [[Johann Gottfried Herder]], who considered language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. Members of the early 20th-century school of American anthropology including [[Franz Boas]] and [[Edward Sapir]] also approved versions of the idea to a certain extent, including in a 1928 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America,{{sfn|Koerner|1992|page=180}} but Sapir, in particular, wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism. Sapir's student, [[Benjamin Lee Whorf]], came to be considered as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences for human cognition and behavior. [[Harry Hoijer]], another of Sapir's students, introduced the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis",<ref>"The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", in {{harvnb|Hoijer|1954|pp=92–105}}.</ref> even though the two scholars never formally advanced any such hypothesis.<ref>This usage is now generally considered as a misnomer. As Jane Hill and Bruce Mannheim write: Yet, just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire the "Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis" is neither consistent with the writings of Sapir and Whorf, nor a hypothesis {{harv|Hill| Mannheim |1992| p=386}}</ref> A strong version of relativist theory was developed from the late 1920s by the German linguist [[Leo Weisgerber]]. Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by [[Roger Brown (psychologist)|Roger Brown]] and [[Eric Lenneberg]] who performed experiments designed to determine whether [[color perception]] varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently.

As the emphasis of the universal nature of human language and cognition developed during the 1960s, the idea of linguistic relativity became disfavored among linguists. From the late 1980s, a new school of linguistic relativity scholars has examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for non-deterministic versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.<ref name="Koerner">Koerner, E.F.K. "Towards a full pedigree of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis: from Locke to Lucy", chapter in {{harvnb|Pütz|Verspoor|2000|p=17}}.</ref>{{sfn|Wolff|Holmes|2011}} Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains, although they are generally weak. Currently, a nuanced opinion of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better considered as developing from [[Connectionism|connectionist]] factors. Research emphasizes exploring the manners and extent to which language influences thought.<ref name="Koerner" />

=== Ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment ===
The idea that language and thought are intertwined is ancient. In his dialogue [[Cratylus (dialogue)|Cratylus]], [[Plato]] explores the idea that conceptions of reality, such as [[Heraclitus|Heraclitean]] flux, are embedded in language. But Plato has been read as arguing against [[sophist]] thinkers such as [[Gorgias of Leontini]], who claimed that the physical world cannot be experienced except through language; this made the question of truth dependent on aesthetic preferences or functional consequences. Plato may have held instead that the world consisted of eternal ideas and that language should represent these ideas as accurately as possible.<ref name="McComiskey2002">{{cite book|first=Bruce |last=McComiskey|title=Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric|url={{google books |plainurl=y |id=s3T6LYkGOqUC}}|year=2002|publisher=SIU Press|isbn=978-0-8093-2397-5}}</ref> Nevertheless, Plato's [[Seventh Letter]] claims that ultimate truth is inexpressible in words.

Following Plato, [[St. Augustine]], for example, argued that language was merely like labels applied to concepts existing already. This opinion remained prevalent throughout the [[Middle Ages]].{{sfn|Gumperz|Levinson|1996|p=2}} [[Roger Bacon]] had the opinion that language was but a veil covering eternal truths, hiding them from human experience. For [[Immanuel Kant]], language was but one of several methods used by humans to experience the world.

=== German Romantic philosophers ===
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence of different national characters, or ''Volksgeister'', of different ethnic groups was a major motivator for the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism.{{sfn|Leavitt|2010|p=75}}

==== Johann Georg Hamann ====
[[Johann Georg Hamann]] is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to discuss the concept of the "genius" of a language.<ref>Robert L. Miller ''The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian Ethnolinguistics'' p. 18.</ref>{{sfn|McAfee|2004}} In his "Essay Concerning an Academic Question", Hamann suggests that a people's language affects their worldview:

{{blockquote|The lineaments of their language will thus correspond to the direction of their mentality.<ref>Quoted in Bernard D. Den Ouden, ''Language and Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Essay in Chomskyan Humanism,'' p. 25.</ref>}}

==== Wilhelm von Humboldt ====
[[File:WilhelmvonHumboldt.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Wilhelm von Humboldt]]]] In 1820, [[Wilhelm von Humboldt]] associated the study of language with the national romanticist program by proposing that language is the fabric of thought. Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker's native language.<ref name="Trabant">Trabant, Jürgen. "How relativistic are Humboldts "Weltansichten"?", in {{harvnb|Pütz|Verspoor|2000|p=}}.</ref> This opinion was part of a greater idea in which the assumptions of an ethnic nation, their "''[[Worldview|Weltanschauung]]''", was considered as being represented by the grammar of their language. Von Humboldt argued that languages with an [[inflection]]al [[Morphological typology|morphological type]], such as German, English and the other [[Indo-European languages]], were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the dominance of their speakers with respect to the speakers of less perfect languages. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:

{{blockquote|The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.<ref name="Trabant" />}}In Humboldt's humanistic understanding of linguistics, each language creates the individual's worldview in its particular way through its lexical and [[grammatical category|grammatical categories]], conceptual organization, and syntactic models.<ref name="Kahane&Kahane_1983">{{cite journal |last1=Kahane |first1=Henry |last2=Kahane |first2=Renée |date=1983 |title=Humanistic linguistics |journal=The Journal of Aesthetic Education |volume=17 |issue=4 |pages=65–89 |doi=10.2307/3332265 |jstor=3332265}}</ref>

Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human/rational or a divine origin.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Beek |first1=Wouter |title=Linguistic Relativism Variants and Misconceptions |url=https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/b.bredeweg/pdf/BSc/20052006/Beek.pdf |website=Universiteit van Amsterdam |access-date=18 November 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210126014428/https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/b.bredeweg/pdf/BSc/20052006/Beek.pdf |archive-date=26 January 2021 |language=en |quote=Linguistic relativism is a relatively new concept, it did not exist in the Enlightenment. It was posed for the first time, as will be treated below, in the Romantic era by Hamann and Herder, and later by Humboldt. |url-status=live}}</ref> Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied to various languages to expand on the hypothesis.

=== Boas and Sapir ===
[[File:FranzBoas.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Franz Boas]] ]]
[[File:Edward Sapir.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Edward Sapir]] ]]

The idea that some languages are superior to others and that lesser languages maintained their speakers in intellectual poverty was widespread during the early 20th century.{{sfn|Migge|Léglise|2007}} American linguist [[William Dwight Whitney]], for example, actively strove to eradicate [[Indigenous languages of the Americas|Native American languages]], arguing that their speakers were savages and would be better off learning English and adopting a "civilized" way of life.{{sfn|Seuren|1998|p=180}} The first anthropologist and linguist to challenge this opinion was [[Franz Boas]].{{sfn|Seuren|1998|p=181}} While performing geographical research in northern Canada he became fascinated with the [[Inuit]] and decided to become an [[Ethnography|ethnographer]]. Boas stressed the equal worth of all cultures and languages, that there was no such thing as a primitive language and that all languages were capable of expressing the same content, albeit by widely differing means.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Dall|first1=Wm. H.|last2=Boas|first2=Franz|date=1887|title=Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1762958|journal=Science|volume=9|issue=228|pages=587–589|doi=10.1126/science.ns-9.228.587|jstor=1762958|pmid=17779724|bibcode=1887Sci.....9..587D|s2cid=46250503 |issn=0036-8075}}</ref> Boas saw language as an inseparable part of culture and he was among the first to require of ethnographers to learn the native language of the culture to be studied and to document verbal culture such as [[myth]]s and legends in the original language.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Ottenheimer|first=Harriet|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/216940204|title=The anthropology of language : an introduction to linguistic anthropology|date=2009|publisher=Wadsworth|isbn=978-0-495-50884-7|edition=2nd|location=Belmont, CA|pages=8|oclc=216940204}}</ref><ref>Boas, Franz (1911). Introduction. ''Handbook of American Indian Languages''. vol. 1, p. 1–83. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology). p. 73.</ref>

Boas:

{{blockquote|It does not seem likely [...] that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language."<ref name="BOAS1911">{{cite book |url={{google books |plainurl=y |id=EnZC68mmRhQC}}|last=Boas |first=Franz|year=1911|title=Handbook of American Indian languages|volume=1|publisher=Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).}}</ref>}}

Boas' student Edward Sapir referred to the Humboldtian idea that languages were a major factor for understanding the cultural assumptions of peoples.{{sfn|Leavitt|2010|p=133}} He espoused the opinion that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation. Sapir also thought because language represented reality differently, it followed that the speakers of different languages would perceive reality differently.

Sapir:

{{blockquote|No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.<ref>{{citation|last=Sapir |first=Edward|year=1929|title= The status of linguistics as a science|journal=Language|volume=5|doi=10.2307/409588|issue=4|pages=207–214|jstor=409588|hdl=11858/00-001M-0000-002C-4321-4|s2cid=147181342 |hdl-access=free}}</ref>}}

However, Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating, "It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language."<ref name="SapirSwadesh1946">{{cite book|first1=Edward |last1=Sapir|first2=Morris |last2=Swadesh |author-link1=Morris Swadesh|title=American Indian Grammatical Categories|url={{google books |plainurl=y |id=wSYJMgEACAAJ|page=100}}|year=1946 |pages=100–107}}</ref>

Sapir was explicit that the associations between language and culture were neither extensive nor particularly profound, if they existed at all:

{{blockquote|It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture; closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas... The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves.{{sfn|Sapir|1921|p=213–4}}}}

Sapir offered similar observations about speakers of so-called "world" or [[modern language|"modern" languages]], noting, "possession of a common language is still and will continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual understanding between England and America, but it is very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence. A common language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the geographical, physical, and economics determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout the area."{{sfn|Sapir|1921|p=215}}

While Sapir never made a practice of studying directly how languages affected thought, some notion of (probably "weak") linguistic relativity affected his basic understanding of language, and would be developed by Whorf.{{sfn|Leavitt|2010|p=135}}

=== Independent developments in Europe ===
Drawing on influences such as Humboldt and [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], some European thinkers developed ideas similar to those of Sapir and Whorf, generally working in isolation from each other. Prominent in Germany from the late 1920s through the 1960s were the strongly relativist theories of [[Leo Weisgerber]] and his concept of a 'linguistic inter-world', mediating between external reality and the forms of a given language, in ways peculiar to that language.<ref>For a critique of Weisgerber, see, for example: Beat Lehmann (1998), ''ROT ist nicht ″rot″ ist nicht [rot]. Eine Bilanz und Neuinterpretation der linguistischen Relativitätstheorie''. Gunter Narr, Tübingen. pp. 58–80; Iwar Werlen (2002), 'Das Worten der Welt', in: ''Lexikologie ... Ein internationales Handbuch'', ed. by D. Alan Cruse et al., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin & New York, 1. pp. 380–391.</ref> Russian psychologist [[Lev Vygotsky]] read Sapir's work and experimentally studied the ways in which the development of concepts in children was influenced by structures given in language. His 1934 work "''Thought and Language''"<ref>Vygotsky, L. (1934/1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.</ref> has been compared to Whorf's and taken as mutually supportive evidence of language's influence on cognition.{{sfn|Lucy|Wertsch|1987}} Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism [[Alfred Korzybski]] developed the theory of [[general semantics]] that has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity.{{sfn|Pula|1992}} Though influential in their own right, this work has not been influential in the debate on linguistic relativity, which has tended to be based on the American paradigm exemplified by Sapir and Whorf.

=== Benjamin Lee Whorf ===
{{Main|Benjamin Lee Whorf}}

More than any linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he termed the "linguistic relativity principle".{{sfn|Whorf|1956|p=214}} Studying [[Indigenous peoples of the Americas|Native American]] languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language-use differences affected perception. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the relation between language and thought remain under contention. However, a version of theory holds some "merit", for example, "different words mean different things in different languages; not every word in every language has a one-to-one exact translation in a different language"<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.nursinghero.com/study-guides/atd-hostos-child-development-education/linguistic-relativity |website=Nursing Hero |title=Linguistic Relativity |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240509221855/https://www.nursinghero.com/study-guides/atd-hostos-child-development-education/linguistic-relativity |archive-date=2024-05-09}}</ref> Critics such as Lenneberg,{{sfn|Lenneberg|1953}} [[Max Black|Black]], and [[Steven Pinker|Pinker]]{{sfn|Pinker|1994|pp=59-64}} attribute to Whorf a strong linguistic determinism, while [[John A. Lucy|Lucy]], [[Michael Silverstein|Silverstein]] and [[Stephen C. Levinson|Levinson]] point to Whorf's explicit rejections of determinism, and where he contends that translation and [[Commensurability (philosophy of science)|commensuration]] are possible.

Detractors such as Lenneberg,{{sfn|Lenneberg|1953}} [[Noam Chomsky|Chomsky]] and Pinker{{sfn|Pinker|1994|p=60}} criticized him for insufficient clarity of his description of how language influences thought, and for not proving his conjectures. Most of his arguments were in the form of anecdotes and speculations that served as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were associated with what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. In Whorf's words:

{{blockquote|We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.{{sfn|Whorf|1956|p=212–214}}}}

[[File:Whorf Shawnee Example.png|400px|thumb|Whorf's illustration of the difference between the English and Shawnee gestalt construction of cleaning a gun with a ramrod. From the article "Science and Linguistics", originally published in the ''MIT Technology Review'', 1940.]]

=== Several terms for a single concept ===
Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where a non-European language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "[[Standard Average European]]" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of less-studied languages).

One of Whorf's examples was the supposedly large number of words for [[Eskimo words for snow|'snow' in the Inuit languages]], an example that later was contested as a misrepresentation.{{sfn|Pullum|1991}}

Another is the [[Hopi language]]'s words for water, one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water.{{sfn|Whorf|2012|p=182}}

These examples of [[polysemy]] served the double purpose of showing that non-European languages sometimes made more specific semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts such as snow or water, is not always possible.{{sfn|Whorf|2012|p=203}}

Another example is from Whorf's experience as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector.{{sfn|Pullum|1991}} While inspecting a chemical plant he observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels, no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous because of the flammable vapors still in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word ''empty'' in association to the barrels had resulted in the workers unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg{{sfn|Lenneberg|1953}} as not actually demonstrating causality between the use of the word ''empty'' and the action of smoking, but instead was an example of [[circular reasoning]]. Pinker in ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human insight rather than language.{{sfn|Pinker|1994|p=60}}

=== Time in Hopi ===
Whorf's most elaborate argument for linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of [[Hopi time controversy|time as a conceptual category among the Hopi]].{{sfn|Whorf|1956}} He argued that in contrast to English and other [[Standard Average European|SAE languages]], Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years", but rather as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental to [[Hopi]] culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.

[[Ekkehart Malotki]] later claimed that he had found no evidence of Whorf's claims in 1980's era Hopi speakers, nor in historical documents dating back to the arrival of Europeans. Malotki used evidence from archaeological data, calendars, historical documents, and modern speech; he concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time in the way Whorf suggested. Many universalist scholars such as Pinker consider Malotki's study as a final refutation of Whorf's claim about Hopi, whereas relativist scholars such as [[John A Lucy]] and Penny Lee criticized Malotki's study for mischaracterizing Whorf's claims and for forcing Hopi grammar into a model of analysis that does not fit the data.<ref>{{harvnb|Lee|1996}}, {{harvnb|Leavitt|2011|pp=179–187}}, {{harvnb|Lucy|1992b|p=286}}, {{harvnb|Lucy|1996|p=43}}, {{harvnb|Dinwoodie|2006}}.</ref>

=== Structure-centered approach ===
Whorf's argument about Hopi speakers' conceptualization of time is an example of the structure-centered method of research into linguistic relativity, which Lucy identified as one of three main types of research of the topic.<ref name=":3">Lucy, J. A. (1997). "The linguistics of 'color{{'"}}. In C.L. Hardin & L. Maffi (eds.), ''Color categories in thought and language'' (pp. 320–436). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</ref> The "structure-centered" method starts with a language's structural peculiarity and examines its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The defining example is Whorf's observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is Lucy's research describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the [[Mayan languages|Mayan language]] [[Yucatec Maya|Yucatec]] result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by English speakers.{{sfn|Lucy|1992b|p=}} However, philosophers including [[Donald Davidson (philosopher)|Donald Davidson]] and [[Jason Josephson Storm]] have argued that Whorf's Hopi examples are self-refuting, as Whorf had to translate Hopi terms into English in order to explain how they are untranslatable.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Josephson-Storm|first=Jason Ānanda|url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1249473210|title=Metamodernism : the future of theory|date=2021|isbn=978-0-226-78679-7|location=Chicago|pages=185|oclc=1249473210}}</ref>

=== Whorf dies ===
Whorf died in 1941 at age 44, leaving multiple unpublished papers. His ideas were continued by linguists and anthropologists such as Hoijer and [[Dorothy D. Lee|Lee]], who both continued investigating the effect of language on habitual thought, and [[George L. Trager|Trager]], who prepared a number of Whorf's papers for posthumous publishing. The most important event for the dissemination of Whorf's ideas to a larger public was the publication in 1956 of his major writings on the topic of linguistic relativity in a single volume titled ''Language, Thought and Reality''.

=== Brown and Lenneberg ===
In 1953, [[Eric Lenneberg]] criticized Whorf's examples from an [[Objectivity and subjectivity|objectivist]] philosophy of language, claiming that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world, and that even though languages express these ideas in various ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are equivalent. He argued that Whorf's English descriptions of a Hopi speaker's idea of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English, therefore disproving linguistic relativity. However Whorf was concerned with how the habitual ''use'' of language influences habitual behavior, rather than translatability. Whorf's point was that while English speakers may be able to ''understand'' how a Hopi speaker thinks, they do not ''think'' in that way.{{sfn|Lakoff|1987|p=}}

Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he never showed the necessary association between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental phenomenon. With Brown, Lenneberg proposed that proving such an association required directly matching linguistic phenomena with behavior. They assessed linguistic relativity experimentally and published their findings in 1954. Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated a formal hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated their own. Their two tenets were (i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure".{{sfn|Brown|Lenneberg|1954|p=455,457}} Brown later developed them into the so-called "weak" and "strong" formulation:

<blockquote>
* Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the language.
* The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language.{{sfn|Brown|1976|p=128}}
</blockquote>

Brown's formulations became known widely and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.

=== Joshua Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" ===
[[Joshua Aaron Fishman|Joshua Fishman]] argued that Whorf's true assertion was largely overlooked. In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a "neo-[[Johann Gottfried Herder|Herderian]] champion"{{sfn|Fishman|1978}} and in 1982, he proposed "Whorfianism of the third kind" in an attempt to reemphasize what he claimed was Whorf's real interest, namely the intrinsic value of "little peoples" and "little languages".{{sfn|Fishman|1982|p=5}} Whorf had criticized [[Charles Kay Ogden|Ogden]]'s [[Basic English]] thus:

{{blockquote|But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English [...] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. [...] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness.{{sfn|Whorf|1956|p=244}}}}

Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language ''influences'' thought and the strong version that language ''determines'' thought, Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" proposes that language ''is a key to culture''.

=== Leiden school ===
The [[Leiden school]] is a [[theoretical linguistics|linguistic theory]] that models languages as parasites. Notable proponent [[Frederik Kortlandt]], in a 1985 paper outlining Leiden school theory, advocates for a form of linguistic relativity: "The observation that in all [[Yuman languages]] the word for 'work' is a loan from [[Spanish language|Spanish]] should be a major blow to any current economic theory." In the next paragraph, he quotes directly from Sapir: "Even in the most primitive cultures the strategic word is likely to be more powerful than the direct blow."<ref name="Kortlandt1985">{{cite book |last=Kortlandt |first=Frederik |editor-first1=Ursula |editor-first2=Gerhard |editor-last1=Pieper |editor-last2=Stickel |date=1985 |chapter=A Parasitological View of Non-Constructible Sets |chapter-url=https://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art067e.pdf |title=Studia linguistica diachronica et synchronica |publisher=De Gruyter Mouton|doi=10.1515/9783110850604|isbn=9783110850604 }}</ref>

=== ''Rethinking Linguistic Relativity'' ===
The publication of the 1996 anthology ''Rethinking Linguistic Relativity'' edited by [[John J. Gumperz|Gumperz]] and [[Stephen C. Levinson|Levinson]] began a new period of linguistic relativity studies that emphasized cognitive and social aspects. The book included studies on linguistic relativity and universalist traditions. Levinson documented significant linguistic relativity effects in the different linguistic conceptualization of spatial categories in different languages. For example, men speaking the [[Guugu Yimithirr language]] in [[Queensland]] gave accurate navigation instructions using a compass-like system of north, south, east and west, along with a hand gesture pointing to the starting direction.{{sfn|Levinson|1998|p=13}}

Lucy defines this method as "domain-centered" because researchers select a [[semantic domain]] and compare it across linguistic and cultural groups.<ref name=":3" /> Space is another semantic domain that has proven fruitful for linguistic relativity studies.{{sfn|Lucy|1997|p=301}} Spatial categories vary greatly across languages. Speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many ordinary tasks. Levinson and others reported three basic spatial categorizations. While many languages use combinations of them, some languages exhibit only one type and related behaviors. For example, [[Guugu Yimithirr language|Yimithirr]] only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations—the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. Speakers define a location as "north of the house", while an English speaker may use relative positions, saying "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house".{{sfn|Levinson|1996}}

Separate studies by [[Melissa Bowerman|Bowerman]] and [[Dan Slobin|Slobin]] analyzed the role of language in cognitive processes. Bowerman showed that certain cognitive processes did not use language to any significant extent and therefore could not be subject to linguistic relativity.{{clarify|date=November 2022}}<ref>Bowerman, Melissa (1974). "Learning the Structure of Causative Verbs: A Study in the Relationship of Cognitive, Semantic and Syntactic Development." ''Papers and Reports on Child Language Development'', no. 8. Stanford University, California Committee on Linguistics.</ref> Slobin described another kind of cognitive process that he named "thinking for speaking"—- the kind of process in which perceptional data and other kinds of prelinguistic cognition are translated into linguistic terms for communication.{{clarify|date=November 2022}} These, Slobin argues, are the kinds of cognitive process that are the basis of linguistic relativity.<ref>Slobin, Dan I. (1987). "Thinking for Speaking." ''Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.'' p. 435–445.</ref>