[dorchadas]

Very good points on linguistic relativity. I'd also be interested in if any of the studies have been replicated or not. One of the big proponents of linguistic relativity is Lera Boroditsky, author of the famed 'bridge gender study' (that was never actually published!). However, someone tried to replicate that study and they found no statistically meaningful results. I'd be very interested in seeing it for other 'weak linguistic relativity' studies. I'd also be interested to see the debate between language and culture. Is it the culture noticing something that causes the language to develop that way, and influences things? In my view, that's more likely the source of any differences, though I'm still not sure they actually exist.

[Aengeuad]

I can't take credit for the arguments made, they mostly come form the excellent book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, I should have referenced this in the original comment but it's a bit too late to edit it. In the book he takes a very hard stance against linguistic relativism and demonstrates the harm the theory can have when applied by certain people to certain languages or peoples, he even goes as far as to caution about the recent trend for weak relativism. There's also a 45 minute talk he did on the book as well (0).

One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.

Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.

(0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QglKeIIC5Ds

(1) http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/mandarin.pdf

(2) 'Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001)' https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-stromswold/p...

(3) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.690...