Because my last post was about George Orwell's 1984, I thought I could tie this into what I've been anxious to talk about. In 1984, Orwell warns about totalitarian rule with the Party's replacement of "Oldspeak," the English we speak in our world toady, with "Newspeak," a modified version of English with a much smaller vocabulary. After doing a little research, I found that Orwell was incorporating the theme of linguistic determinism -- the theory that language determines thought -- in this feature of the plot. Linguistic determinism is one-half of a broader theory labeled the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis," otherwise known as linguistic relativity, which resulted to be quite interesting for me to research.
I didn't just decide to research linguistic relativity on my free time. It was sort-of forced upon me, as I had to choose a topic for my individual presentation for my AP Seminar Capstone research class that connected to the murky theme of "perception." The College Board releases every year a series of sources and students have to derive their individual projects from a connection found in these sources. So, based on a couple of sources about 3D pavement art, the book Alice Through the Looking-Glass, attitudes towards Muslim women, extra-sensory perception, etc., my classmates chose pretty relevant topics like "lucid dreaming" and "medical marijuana." However, I struggled to chose a topic. Perception?? All I could think about was poor Alice confusing dreams with reality as I wanted to escape my reality of the drawing deadline to finalize and commit to a topic. So I started asking around, and a guy in my Precal class who likes to research the most random things suggested linguistic relativity. I looked at him puzzled, "Don't you mean the theory of relativity?" What does Einstein have to do with this? "No. Linguistic relativity. It's really cool. It's in the movie Arrival. Such a good movie." Great. I was so desperate for a topic idea that now I had to use a movie as reference.
As more and more of my classmates were finding their research topics and turning them in, I was still stuck. So I decided to google "linguistic relativity Arrival" and hope some idea would come to mind, because I am all for movies. I didn't watch the movie right then and there because I wasn't exactly in thr position to do so, but I found out by watching a clip that in Arrival, the main character is able to communicate with aliens that come to Earth by learning their language, and in doing so is able to see the future. She talks about it in the movie and even refers to the name, "Sapir-Whorf." It's a real thing! According to me, after diving deep into researching it, that is.
Here's the break-down: two twentieth century American linguists by the name of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf was Sapir's student) believed in the relationship between language, culture, and thought. Sapir might have even drawn this idea from his teacher, anthropologist Franz Boas, who did several studies on Native American tribes. While Sapir and Whorf never actually got together and named a theory after themselves (I know right, misnomer), linguists today tend to refer to the concept that the experiences gained by individuals are based on the structure of language they speak as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, as if it doesn't get confusing as it is, there are two versions to this theory: the "strong" form of it, called linguistic determinism or Whorfianism, states that language is a pure determinant of thought. Like in 1984. The other version is the "weak" form of the hypothesis and contends that language only influences thought. However, this whole Sapir-Whorf deal was considered a spoof after Noam Chomsky came up with his universal grammar theory in the 60's. This dude, who looks like the man least likely to care about children, basically came up with the idea that all babies are born with the skill set to form grammatical structures. Crazy, right? This idea of an innate "Language Acquisition Device," as Chomsky called it, became the answer that scientists across the world were looking for -- a link between biology and language that can be tracked down to the dawn of humanity -- and linguists began used it in language acquisition practices. Quite recently, Chomsky's idea has been rebuked. Some non-European languages had features that simply did not fit into his universal grammar structure. Meanwhile, the weaker form of linguistic relativity has gained popularity again, with experiments across the board in the psycho-linguistic field that serve to prove Sapir and Whorf's ideas. Such experiments include research that people who speak languages that involve the use of directions are good at keeping track of their location, even in unfamiliar regions. In addition, research conducted by Lera Borodistsky, professor of cognitive psychology at Stanford University, and linguist Alice Gaby where they gave Kuuk Thaayorre speakers from the Pompuraaw tribe in Australia picture cards to organize in correct temporal order revealed that those who think differently about space may probably think differently about time, as the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers arranged the cards from east to west, instead of from left to right like English speakers or from right to left like Hebrew speakers. In addition, categories in language can affect performance of simple perceptual color discrimination tasks due to perceptual distinctions that are habitually made in that particular language, as seen in the Russian speaker advantage in completing color tasks over English speakers due to the distinction between lighter blues and darker blues that exist in the Russian language. Linguistics also impacts thinking in the form of quantities, as seen with the Brazilian Amazon Piraha tribe that have challenges with exact quantities because speakers only use verbal expressions such as “several” and “few” instead of precise numbers. These are all experiments of how language influences the way our brains work, and you can see it in bilinguals, too. Cognitive researchers Danziger and Ward tested whether Arab Israelis’ attitudes towards Arabs and Jews differed depending on if the associations were instigated in Hebrew or Arabic. The results showed that language use can selectively influence the accessibility of socially relevant associations, as well as proving the statements of language and culture being intricately linked and bilingual people thinking about their social circumstance in a different way depending on their current language context. This is crazy! I've experienced this firsthand myself, as I tend to think differently when I speak Spanish than when I speak English. It has to do with culture, and ideals that are valued in that culture as well, I believe.
Anyways, all of this research has gotten me to think about what I want to do as a career choice. I so admire Lera Boroditsky, one of the big researchers that I looked into. What if I could be like her? I also found some TED talks about cognitive researchers, and the field really interested me. As a result from this, I have decided to take AP Psychology next year and find more about how the brain works. Learning that language has such a big impact on our thinking has me wondering what other things influence each person's psychological state.
In addition, I realized that although there are several different languages in the world, there is one language that has been able to cross cultures. MUSIC! Wow, classic me, always relating everything back to music. As I may have discussed somewhere on this blog, music has been around for a long time. The fact that humans have been able to categorize harmonious sounds into a whole written system may be proof that a universal language indeed does exist. Music has been able to be a medium of communication for ideas, and it is something that can be shared and understood by anyone no matter the language they speak. It is why I can go to my Argentinean grandmother and show her my piano books from the U.S., and she is able to play the songs that are written on the page.
Thanks for reading my rant about my current interest!
P.S. The research question I settled on for my Seminar class is, "Should the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis be implemented in second-language acquisition in the United States' education systems?" Have you ever wondered what the effects are from the U.S.'s persistence in having a monolingual culture? The fact that several monolingual people choose to not learn another language due to English being the "superior" language has some drastic consequences...Stay tuned for more!
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