Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Boasian foundations of contemporary ethnolinguistics

Abstract

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956: 213) The phenomena of language are background phenomena, of which the talkers are unaware or, at most, dimly aware… These automatic, involuntary patterns of language are not the same for all men but are specific for each language and constitute the formalized side of the language, or its “grammar.” From this fact proceeds what I have called the “linguistic relativity principle,” which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers, but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956: 221) The role of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) in contemporary ethnolinguistics is an unusually complex one from the standpoint of the histories of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology, not to speak of philosophy. It is arguable that Whorf has been misread more thoroughly than any other social scientist of his generation.