Lingthusiasm Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf
It's a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you'd been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what's the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival?
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We talk about a range of different things that people mean when they refer to this hypothesis: a sciencey-sounding way to introduce obviously fictional concepts like time travel or mind control, a reflection that we add new words all the time as convenient handles to talk about new concepts, a note that grammatical categories can encourage us to pay attention to specific areas in the world (but aren't the only way of doing so), a social reflection that we feel like different people in different environments (which can sometimes align with different languages, though not always). We also talk about several genuine areas of human difference that linguistic relativity misses: different perceptive experiences like synesthesia and aphantasia, as well as how we lump sounds into categories based on what's relevant to a given language.
Finally, we talk about the history of where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes from, why Benjamin Lee Whorf would have been great on TikTok, and why versions of this idea keep bouncing back in different guises as a form of curiosity about the human condition no matter how many specific instances get disproven.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about two sets of updates! We talk about the results from the 2024 listener survey (we learned which one of us you think is more kiki and more bouba!), and our years in review (book related news for both Lauren and Gretchen), plus exciting news for the coming year.
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany on Goodreads
Lingthusiasm episode on the linguistics of the movie Arrival
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast episode 31: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Lingthusiasm episode 'Colour words around the world and inside your brain'
Wikipedia entry for 'Edward Sapir'
‘The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ by Harry Hoijer (1954) (archive.org)
Wikipedia entry for 'Ekkehart Malotki'
Wikipedia entry for 'Hopi time controversy'
'Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003' by Anne Mickan, Maren Schiefke, and Anatol Stefanowitsch
'Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky (2001)' by Jenn-Yeu Chen
'Does grammatical gender affect object concepts? Registered replication of Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)' by Nan Elpers, Greg Jensen, and Kevin J. Holmes
'Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution' by Seán G. Roberts, James Winters, and Keith Chen
Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘North, left, or towards the sea? Interview with Alice Gaby’
'Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210' Interview by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for The Paris Review (unpaywalled photos here)
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
