John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language.) Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. viii, 488. Hb $75.95, pb $27.95

Abstract

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.