Should be noted that "Ebonics" is a rather controversial term. Linguists refer to it as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a less charged term. Language and linguistic conflicts are...
Exemplary
Should be noted that "Ebonics" is a rather controversial term. Linguists refer to it as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a less charged term.
Language and linguistic conflicts are fascinating. Language is tied closely to identity; it's not for nothing that there's a saying, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." Which form(s) of language you use is often a political statement and closely tied to group identity. For instance, during WW2, the Dutch resistance reportedly used the name of the town of Scheveningen as a shibboleth to root out German spies. They just couldn't get that initial consonant cluster right.
There's a particular language conflict not mentioned in the article that I'm personally very familiar with, being Norwegian. It's been quipped that the US and Britain are two countries separated by a common language. Norway is divided internally by a common language. Well, two. It's complicated. The Norwegian language conflict has been going on for 200 years now, and it's not going to get resolved anytime soon.
In 1814, Norway escaped 400 years of Danish rule and gained internal autonomy in a personal union with Sweden. Throughout the 1800s, nationalism spread across Europe, and language became a hot issue. By this time, the only written language in Norway had been Danish for hundreds of years, although the spoken language was very much alive. Two different schools of thought developed: one arguing for gradually Norwegianizing the Danish written language, while the other supported developing an entirely new written language based on the rural, spoken dialects. And that's pretty much where the conflict stands to this day.
Ivar Aasen, a linguist, travelled up and down the country collecting samples of spoken language and developed a new written language which came to be known as nynorsk (New Norwegian). Meanwhile reformers gradually modified Danish to become more in line with spoken Norwegian, and this new written form got the name bokmål (book language). Both written forms represent the same spoken language, both have official status, and each individual is entitled to receive replies in their chosen written standard when they correspond with the authorities. School pupils can choose which standard to use, but are required to also learn the other standard. 90% of the population prefers bokmål, which is closer to Danish and closely models the spoken language in Eastern Norway, the most densely populated area around the capital. The requirement to learn a less favored written standard has led pupils to nickname nynorsk "vomit Norwegian" (it works out to a pun in Norwegian).
That's pretty much where things still stand. Bokmål is by far the most dominant language, but nynorsk isn't going anywhere. And neither standard says anything about how you're supposed to speak. Occasionally the eternal debate erupts all over again.
In the 1950s, the government decided this state of affairs was silly - Norwegian is a small language with only about 5 million speakers (and only 3 million back then). Why split the language further and potentially weaken a literary culture already under threat from foreign languages? So they decided to gradually bring the two more in line, a policy they called "Common Norwegian". This was extremely unpopular. Parents outraged at new textbook standards formed a "Parents' Action Group against Common Norwegian", and gathered 300,000 signatures in protest against "the planned work to forcefully introduce a new, common Norwegian language." They also set to "correcting" textbooks that used the new, controversial written forms.
In the end the government abandoned any attempt at unification and just let things simmer as they had done for the past 100+ years.
English is kind of anarchic compared to many other languages that have official standard forms, like Norwegian or French with its French Academy. One of my favorite quotes about the English language comes from James Nicoll, who wrote: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
This has turned into a long and kind of rambling comment, but I find this stuff really fascinating.
That is a whole other can of worms. It's definitely interesting, but the extent to which language affects thought is very controversial. The disagreements range from the philosophical to the...
That is a whole other can of worms. It's definitely interesting, but the extent to which language affects thought is very controversial. The disagreements range from the philosophical to the empirical. There's a very detailed article on the philosophy of linguistics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that discusses this issue, and others, at length. It points out that claims of linguistic relativity very often fail to one of two issues: they are sufficiently vague to be uninteresting truisms, or they are too strong to be plausible. When one manages to narrow the subject down to a particular niche specific enough to test, the data is often inconclusive.
For instance some studies found that grammatical gender affected the way that people described inanimate objects. Objects that were feminine gender would be described using stereotypically feminine qualities while objects that had masculine grammatical gender would be described by stereotypically masculine qualities. For instance, a bridge, unquestionably an inanimate object of no determinate gender, might be described as "slender" or "elegant" in a language where the word for bridge is feminine, but "sturdy" and "towering" in a language where the word was masculine. But then another study comes along and finds that in bilingual speakers, their chosen adjectives align with monolingual speakers of one language when speaking that language, and with monolingual speakers of another when speaking that language, proving the effect decidedly impermanent.
One of the areas where a fairly robust effect has been demonstrated in multiple experiments is in color discrimination. Different languages have different sets of basic color terms. For instance, both Greek and Russian make a distinction between dark and light blue; the two are not simply the same word "blue" plus an adjective, they're different root words. And it seems that speakers of such languages more quickly distinguish between light and dark blues, but that doesn't mean English speakers can't distinguish between light and dark blue. It's just not a distinction we care to make all the time, and when compelled to do so in the artificial conditions of the lab, we don't do it as quickly and reliably as those for whom their native language compels them to do it all the time.
Examples: Russian speakers could more quickly distinguish hues that were assigned different categories (light blue or dark blue) than hues that were assigned the same linguistic category, while English speakers (for whom all the colors fit into the same linguistic category, blue) did not show any such pattern. Greek makes the same distinction as Russian between dark and light blue, and a study of low-level visual processing in the brain showed that even on an unconscious level, the Greek speakers reacted more strongly to differences between light and dark blue than light and dark green. English speakers showed no such effect.
That's how it goes with most of the experiments on the effect that language has on thought. The big, sweeping claims that seem to be very metaphysical and deep in nature (like the idea that our language may make it impossible, or at least extremely hard to come up with certain ideas that are not naturally expressed in its grammar) usually come out to be untestable. When we manage to make a claim concrete, it's usually fairly narrow, precluding any grand sweeping philosophical conclusions, and the effects seen are usually fairly weak and often ambiguous. Can we make a grand conclusion about the nature of thought from the fact that a Greek or a Russian speaker might more easily distinguish dark blues from light blues than an English speaker? It's certainly a difference, but how significant is it really for the way that we fundamentally view the world?
Another example: Some languages (e.g. some Australian Aboriginal languages) use absolute directions rather than relative ones. It's not your left foot, it's your south foot, and if you turn around, it's your north foot. Some studies have sought to find out whether this linguistic difference affects spatial reasoning or perception. But others have found that you can simulate the same effects in English by manipulating landmark cues in the environment, suggesting that environmental cues are at least a confounding factor.
By the way, one of the most common examples used to illustrate the way that language shapes thoughts is the claim that Eskimos have a very large vocabulary to describe snow. The exact number varies according to different sources, but it's always implied to be much larger than in English. Geoff Pullum, a linguist who co-wrote the encyclopedia article I linked above and also used to be a frequent contributor to the excellent Language Log blog, wrote a great and very funny essay on this subject called The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax .
He (and others) point out that, first of all, it's not particularly interesting if people who deal with snow all the time would have specialized vocabulary for it, no more than it is that experts on typography have a lot of terms for different typefaces. Secondly, that actual dictionaries of Eskimo-Aleut languages do not contain particularly many root words for snow, especially when you consider that English also has words like sleet, hail, blizzard, slush, powder, etc. Thirdly, a lot of the time, when something is a constant presence in the background, you don't pay that much attention to it, like a fish in water or, as Pullum puts it, "a beach bum still only has one word for sand." And fourthly, even if Inuits really had a hundred word for snow (which they don't), this does not prove anything about the effect of language on thought. Who's to say whether they are very particular about snow because their language dictates it, or their language is very particular about snow because snow is super important to their culture and everyday life?
I'm reminded of my dad, who is an engineer, specifically working on building and maintaining roads and related infrastructure like bridges, tunnels, and ferry docks. Naturally, road engineers are quite particular about different grades of gravel, which have different properties and are suitable for different purposes. My dad's employer hired some filmmakers to make promotional videos, and he ended up talking about different kinds of gravel in terms of bigger and smaller rocks. His colleagues thought this pop-sci simplification was hilarious and gently ribbed him for it. But of course to me, or anyone who doesn't build roads, big rock fragments and small rock fragments is about the end of our ability to distinguish different kinds of gravel. Somehow this does not seem to add up to some grand generalization about the nature of perception or human cognition.
Kousta et al conducted a similar study comparing monolingual and bilingual Italian and English speakers. They were measuring a different way that grammatical gender can affect thought, namely,...
The bridge study (which is explored in the linked meta-study) was conducted in English by "highly proficient" speakers native to Spanish/German, so at the very least it can be seen there is permanence crossing from gendered to non-gendered languages.
Kousta et al conducted a similar study comparing monolingual and bilingual Italian and English speakers. They were measuring a different way that grammatical gender can affect thought, namely, error induction. Semantic substitution errors (e.g. "eye" when "ear" was intended) are more common when words are phonologically similar, but also more common when words share the same grammatical gender. This effect was found in monolingual Italian speakers, and in bilingual Italian speakers when speaking Italian, but not in bilingual Italian speakers when speaking English. Thus, this effect did not seem to persist when switching languages.
This particular study doesn't test the exact same thing, and so doesn't directly contradict the study you're talking about, but both concern the relation between grammatical gender and associations from slightly different angles. This is what I mean by the data being inconclusive or hard to interpret. Especially once we try to move from a very concrete claim about a narrow phenomeneon in a particular language to a more general statement about broader issues cross-linguistically.
The article you linked makes a distinction between thinking, speaking, and "thinking for speaking". The same concept is invoked both in the study I linked in this comment and in the encyclopedia article I linked above. The hypothesis is that when using thought in service of language, a particular language exerts a temporary effect on thought. However, this effect disappears when one is no longer "thinking for speaking" in that language. This hypothesis is quite a bit weaker than the idea that our native language exerts a permanent influence on our thought even when we are engaged in non-verbal kinds of thinking or when we are speaking a second language at a highly proficient level.
Should be noted that "Ebonics" is a rather controversial term. Linguists refer to it as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a less charged term.
Language and linguistic conflicts are fascinating. Language is tied closely to identity; it's not for nothing that there's a saying, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy." Which form(s) of language you use is often a political statement and closely tied to group identity. For instance, during WW2, the Dutch resistance reportedly used the name of the town of Scheveningen as a shibboleth to root out German spies. They just couldn't get that initial consonant cluster right.
There's a particular language conflict not mentioned in the article that I'm personally very familiar with, being Norwegian. It's been quipped that the US and Britain are two countries separated by a common language. Norway is divided internally by a common language. Well, two. It's complicated. The Norwegian language conflict has been going on for 200 years now, and it's not going to get resolved anytime soon.
In 1814, Norway escaped 400 years of Danish rule and gained internal autonomy in a personal union with Sweden. Throughout the 1800s, nationalism spread across Europe, and language became a hot issue. By this time, the only written language in Norway had been Danish for hundreds of years, although the spoken language was very much alive. Two different schools of thought developed: one arguing for gradually Norwegianizing the Danish written language, while the other supported developing an entirely new written language based on the rural, spoken dialects. And that's pretty much where the conflict stands to this day.
Ivar Aasen, a linguist, travelled up and down the country collecting samples of spoken language and developed a new written language which came to be known as nynorsk (New Norwegian). Meanwhile reformers gradually modified Danish to become more in line with spoken Norwegian, and this new written form got the name bokmål (book language). Both written forms represent the same spoken language, both have official status, and each individual is entitled to receive replies in their chosen written standard when they correspond with the authorities. School pupils can choose which standard to use, but are required to also learn the other standard. 90% of the population prefers bokmål, which is closer to Danish and closely models the spoken language in Eastern Norway, the most densely populated area around the capital. The requirement to learn a less favored written standard has led pupils to nickname nynorsk "vomit Norwegian" (it works out to a pun in Norwegian).
That's pretty much where things still stand. Bokmål is by far the most dominant language, but nynorsk isn't going anywhere. And neither standard says anything about how you're supposed to speak. Occasionally the eternal debate erupts all over again.
In the 1950s, the government decided this state of affairs was silly - Norwegian is a small language with only about 5 million speakers (and only 3 million back then). Why split the language further and potentially weaken a literary culture already under threat from foreign languages? So they decided to gradually bring the two more in line, a policy they called "Common Norwegian". This was extremely unpopular. Parents outraged at new textbook standards formed a "Parents' Action Group against Common Norwegian", and gathered 300,000 signatures in protest against "the planned work to forcefully introduce a new, common Norwegian language." They also set to "correcting" textbooks that used the new, controversial written forms.
In the end the government abandoned any attempt at unification and just let things simmer as they had done for the past 100+ years.
English is kind of anarchic compared to many other languages that have official standard forms, like Norwegian or French with its French Academy. One of my favorite quotes about the English language comes from James Nicoll, who wrote: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
This has turned into a long and kind of rambling comment, but I find this stuff really fascinating.
That is a whole other can of worms. It's definitely interesting, but the extent to which language affects thought is very controversial. The disagreements range from the philosophical to the empirical. There's a very detailed article on the philosophy of linguistics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that discusses this issue, and others, at length. It points out that claims of linguistic relativity very often fail to one of two issues: they are sufficiently vague to be uninteresting truisms, or they are too strong to be plausible. When one manages to narrow the subject down to a particular niche specific enough to test, the data is often inconclusive.
For instance some studies found that grammatical gender affected the way that people described inanimate objects. Objects that were feminine gender would be described using stereotypically feminine qualities while objects that had masculine grammatical gender would be described by stereotypically masculine qualities. For instance, a bridge, unquestionably an inanimate object of no determinate gender, might be described as "slender" or "elegant" in a language where the word for bridge is feminine, but "sturdy" and "towering" in a language where the word was masculine. But then another study comes along and finds that in bilingual speakers, their chosen adjectives align with monolingual speakers of one language when speaking that language, and with monolingual speakers of another when speaking that language, proving the effect decidedly impermanent.
One of the areas where a fairly robust effect has been demonstrated in multiple experiments is in color discrimination. Different languages have different sets of basic color terms. For instance, both Greek and Russian make a distinction between dark and light blue; the two are not simply the same word "blue" plus an adjective, they're different root words. And it seems that speakers of such languages more quickly distinguish between light and dark blues, but that doesn't mean English speakers can't distinguish between light and dark blue. It's just not a distinction we care to make all the time, and when compelled to do so in the artificial conditions of the lab, we don't do it as quickly and reliably as those for whom their native language compels them to do it all the time.
Examples: Russian speakers could more quickly distinguish hues that were assigned different categories (light blue or dark blue) than hues that were assigned the same linguistic category, while English speakers (for whom all the colors fit into the same linguistic category, blue) did not show any such pattern. Greek makes the same distinction as Russian between dark and light blue, and a study of low-level visual processing in the brain showed that even on an unconscious level, the Greek speakers reacted more strongly to differences between light and dark blue than light and dark green. English speakers showed no such effect.
That's how it goes with most of the experiments on the effect that language has on thought. The big, sweeping claims that seem to be very metaphysical and deep in nature (like the idea that our language may make it impossible, or at least extremely hard to come up with certain ideas that are not naturally expressed in its grammar) usually come out to be untestable. When we manage to make a claim concrete, it's usually fairly narrow, precluding any grand sweeping philosophical conclusions, and the effects seen are usually fairly weak and often ambiguous. Can we make a grand conclusion about the nature of thought from the fact that a Greek or a Russian speaker might more easily distinguish dark blues from light blues than an English speaker? It's certainly a difference, but how significant is it really for the way that we fundamentally view the world?
Another example: Some languages (e.g. some Australian Aboriginal languages) use absolute directions rather than relative ones. It's not your left foot, it's your south foot, and if you turn around, it's your north foot. Some studies have sought to find out whether this linguistic difference affects spatial reasoning or perception. But others have found that you can simulate the same effects in English by manipulating landmark cues in the environment, suggesting that environmental cues are at least a confounding factor.
By the way, one of the most common examples used to illustrate the way that language shapes thoughts is the claim that Eskimos have a very large vocabulary to describe snow. The exact number varies according to different sources, but it's always implied to be much larger than in English. Geoff Pullum, a linguist who co-wrote the encyclopedia article I linked above and also used to be a frequent contributor to the excellent Language Log blog, wrote a great and very funny essay on this subject called The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax .
He (and others) point out that, first of all, it's not particularly interesting if people who deal with snow all the time would have specialized vocabulary for it, no more than it is that experts on typography have a lot of terms for different typefaces. Secondly, that actual dictionaries of Eskimo-Aleut languages do not contain particularly many root words for snow, especially when you consider that English also has words like sleet, hail, blizzard, slush, powder, etc. Thirdly, a lot of the time, when something is a constant presence in the background, you don't pay that much attention to it, like a fish in water or, as Pullum puts it, "a beach bum still only has one word for sand." And fourthly, even if Inuits really had a hundred word for snow (which they don't), this does not prove anything about the effect of language on thought. Who's to say whether they are very particular about snow because their language dictates it, or their language is very particular about snow because snow is super important to their culture and everyday life?
I'm reminded of my dad, who is an engineer, specifically working on building and maintaining roads and related infrastructure like bridges, tunnels, and ferry docks. Naturally, road engineers are quite particular about different grades of gravel, which have different properties and are suitable for different purposes. My dad's employer hired some filmmakers to make promotional videos, and he ended up talking about different kinds of gravel in terms of bigger and smaller rocks. His colleagues thought this pop-sci simplification was hilarious and gently ribbed him for it. But of course to me, or anyone who doesn't build roads, big rock fragments and small rock fragments is about the end of our ability to distinguish different kinds of gravel. Somehow this does not seem to add up to some grand generalization about the nature of perception or human cognition.
Kousta et al conducted a similar study comparing monolingual and bilingual Italian and English speakers. They were measuring a different way that grammatical gender can affect thought, namely, error induction. Semantic substitution errors (e.g. "eye" when "ear" was intended) are more common when words are phonologically similar, but also more common when words share the same grammatical gender. This effect was found in monolingual Italian speakers, and in bilingual Italian speakers when speaking Italian, but not in bilingual Italian speakers when speaking English. Thus, this effect did not seem to persist when switching languages.
This particular study doesn't test the exact same thing, and so doesn't directly contradict the study you're talking about, but both concern the relation between grammatical gender and associations from slightly different angles. This is what I mean by the data being inconclusive or hard to interpret. Especially once we try to move from a very concrete claim about a narrow phenomeneon in a particular language to a more general statement about broader issues cross-linguistically.
The article you linked makes a distinction between thinking, speaking, and "thinking for speaking". The same concept is invoked both in the study I linked in this comment and in the encyclopedia article I linked above. The hypothesis is that when using thought in service of language, a particular language exerts a temporary effect on thought. However, this effect disappears when one is no longer "thinking for speaking" in that language. This hypothesis is quite a bit weaker than the idea that our native language exerts a permanent influence on our thought even when we are engaged in non-verbal kinds of thinking or when we are speaking a second language at a highly proficient level.