Almost forty years ago, the “Whorf Hypothesis”
was one of the things that attracted me to linguistic anthropology.
George Orwell's 1984, with its dark vision
of a world made safe for power by bureaucratic euphemism,
was one of my favorite books, and Whorf's claim that
novel and valuable ways of understanding the world might
be encoded in small stateless languages struck me as a
particularly telling and precise statement of a large anthropological
commitment. But my own Whorfianism, and everybody else's
as well, was soon to be seriously challenged. In the late
1960s and early 1970s, new scholarship on language universals
and linguistic typology undercut the theory of linguistic
relativity. Whorf's own best-known descriptive claims,
especially those about Hopi, were challenged by knowledgeable
field workers (Voegelin et al. 1979, Malotki 1983). By
the early 1990s, Steven Pinker could confidently write
that Whorfianism was “wrong, all wrong” (1994:57),
“outlandish” (63), and “bunk” (65)
– and this is a mere subsample of Pinker's characterizations.
Language-Relative Construal of Individuation Constrained by Universal Ontology: Revisiting Language Universals and Linguistic Relativity
