RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

Today’s post will discuss the interrelationships between language and thought. There have been a number of experiments and debates to show that language is not independent of thought. This debate has occupied a lot of philosophers, linguists, anthropologists and psychologists for centuries dating back to Plato due to the different views they hold over the same. 

Some claim that most of the activities in life involve the use of language because most of the ideas are told using one’s language. Also, the internal thinking which results into logical conclusions comes about due to some degree of the use of language. While other linguists and researchers on the other hand hold that language and thought are two separate and independent entities. The other group feels language partially influences thought.

LANGUAGE INFLUENCES THOUGHT

The early philosophers believed that in order for one to express him/ herself in any way, thought was important.

The first one is motor theory for speech and perception which is behavioural in nature. The proponents for this theory argue that speech is some kind of monologue and behaviour essential for thought. They felt that one would not think without knowing how to talk. This was claimed to be evident from the way a person who is learning how to talk takes time to think and repeat on what is to be said.

The second theory about the idea that language influences thought, is the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism as it is popularly known, this theory has two versions.

·         The first one is called linguistic determinismand is regarded as a strong version in as far as the influence language has on thought is concerned. This version says language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.

·         The weak version, also known as linguistic relativitysays that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour. This means people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently.

Basing the arguments on linguistic determinism, the proponents of this theory said that the vocabulary one has for a language influences how the world is viewed. It says that the differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think. That means speakers of different languages will tend to think and behave differently depending on the language they use. 

This principle further states that the structure of a human being’s language influences the manner in which he understands reality and behaviours. Since one’s view is influenced by language, then it follows that uses of markedly different grammars are pointed out by their grammars towards different types of observations and hence arrive at different views of the world. In this theory, scholars like Sapir, Whorf and Vygotsky argued that

(1)   The grammar of each language was the one responsible for shaping one’s ideas.

(2)   Thought is born through words. That is to say, one’s thinking is determined by language. They believed that the most common way to express thought was through words. Once something was labelled with a word, they felt it had a direct effect on an individual’s thought process, of that thing. The greater ability an individual has to label things seems to relate to a greater understanding of that thing and that might be different to a person using different words.

The common argument for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the perception of colour across the languages. According to the hypothesis, Whorf argued that if one language categorises colour differently than another language, then the different groups should perceive it differently also.

The last theory is the one which states that language determines our culture. This theory says that culture is affected by language. The examples to show that the cultural environment that people grow up in has a lot of influence on how they interpret the world around them were about the distinction of colours. This theory says that our culture, through a language guides us to see the spectrum. Otherwise there are no distinct colours like red, green and other colours on them.

In other words the colours people see are predetermined by what their culture prepares them to see. They further said that the spectrum gets divided in more categories as the environment, culture and language respond by creating new terminologies to them. They argue that the cultural environment that people grow up in have effects on how they interpret the world around them and the language they used. This also was dispelled by saying that one can speak the same language but have different views about the world. Apart from that people can speak the same language but the culture around the can keep on changing with time.

LANGUAGE DOES NOT INFLUENCE THOUGHT

Many researchers did not agree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Basing on Whorf s claim, they felt he failed to show a real relationship between languages and thought.

(1)   The objections to this theory are that some children born deaf and even from deaf parents have proved that they can still think by doing a number of things with a best example being Helen killer who had never heard of any language but grew up as a lecturer, author and, political activist of the years between 1880 and 1968 of her life time.

(2)   Another argument is that of animals that cannot talk but are able to do a number of tasks which shows that language is not essential to thought. Carrol gives support to this thought

(3)   Continuing with a comparative trend, it is important to note that children also who have not yet learned to speak can solve some simple problems at their disposal. For instance if something is placed away from a reach of a child, it will find alternatives to get that thing by crawling towards it. That action demands thinking without the use of language. Apart from that, the bilinguals have one storage system which enables them to organise speech without any problems. So the researchers argued that this also proved that language was independent of thought.

(4)   The other point refuting the claim that Language influences thought is that of the concept of universals. These are characteristic patterns of the language across various cultures in the world. For instance, all languages have nouns and verbs or all spoken languages have consonants and vowels. It is believed that there are grammatical observations which apply to all languages which constitute what is known as generative grammar. This theory claims that there are deep structures that are common to all languages.

(5)   Furthermore, Lenneberg also refuted the Whorfian perspective which promotes the idea that language influences thought. His argument against this theory was that linguistic and non-linguistic events must be separately observed and described before they can be correlated.

(6)   The other view which was used against this hypothesis was if this view was held as true, then there would be no thought without language. Furthermore, if there is no variations in thinking, speakers of different languages would never see the world in the same way. It would also mean that people speaking diverse languages would never understand each other.

LANGUAGE PARTIALLY INFLUENCES THOUGHT

On the same subject, other researchers feel that Language partially influences thought with the following argument. From the examples Whorf gave on the Hopi and other related points, some researchers held that language just partially determines thought. The support for the idea that language partially influences thought can be seen in the concept of codability. Codability can be seen as the ability to translate a word, phrase or idea from one language to another. 

Those who speak two or more languages would agree that some ideas are easier expressed in one language than the other. Many times some situations which would require one word to explain, it would take sentences or phrases in another language to describe. This concept of codability exemplifies the idea of language partially influencing thought because in one language a speaker may be able to perceive a lexical category better than another but that does not limit another language from being able to perceive the same category.

The other point is in determining language linguistic relativity, the question is not whether a language affects one’s thoughts but to what degree it does so and many examples are given to support this argument. One of them was the example done by Linda Rogers where she read a story in English to a group of bilingual children while recording their brain wave patterns. She first read the story in English while observing that the children’s brains were active in the right hemisphere and then read the story in Navaho and observed their brain activity was in the right hemisphere. 

This according to Rodgers gave evidence to the fact that English as a noun-centred language was processed in the left brain and the Navaho as a verb-centred language was processed in the right side of the brain. Therefore, it was concluded that although the same story was told to the same children, they processed the story differently according to which language it was told in.