General orientation

This study examines the linguistic relativity hypothesis, that is, the proposal that diverse languages influence the thought of those who speak them. This has been an important issue in our intellectual tradition for several hundred years. How far back the concern can be traced is largely a function of how one understands the terms language and thought and how explicit an hypothesis one requires. Relatively contemporary formulations begin to appear in eighteenth-century Germany with the work of Machaelis, Hamann, and Herder (R. L. Brown, 1967; Koerner, 1977; Penn, 1972; Stam, 1980; cf. Aarsleff, 1982; Friedrich, 1986). Interest continues in the nineteenth century, again particularly in Germany, and begins to separate from speculative philosophy, especially in the work of Wm. von Humboldt. In the twentieth century the main line of empirical research moves to America with the development of Boasian anthropology. There are undoubtedly important connections between this new work in America and the earlier nineteenth-century German work of Humboldt, Müller, and Steinthal (Haugen, 1977; Hymes, 1963; Stam, 1980), but there was fresh impetus too deriving from firsthand contact with the incredible diversity of native American linguistic forms and from the emergence in contemporary anthropology of an anti-evolutionary project with an emphasis on the functionally and temporally equivalent value of these diverse languages (Stocking, 1974).

The general roots of our interest in the problem of linguistic relativity have never been extensively examined, although this is an important problem (Lucy, 1985a; cf. Friedrich, 1986).