6.2 Language and the Mind

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the role of language in categorizing items in the natural world.
• Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
• Provide at least two examples of linguistic universals.
• Describe how metaphor shapes how we talk about abstract concepts.

As discussed in the previous section, certain cognitive abilities were crucial to the development of language in humans. And reciprocally, once language emerged, it shaped our thoughts and actions in ways that helped our species cooperate, invent, learn, and adapt to the environment. Language must have been a fundamental element in the creation of human culture (singular) and the eventual development into human cultures (plural) as different groups of humans moved into different geographical areas and began adapting to different conditions.

One key advantage of language is that it provides a way of encoding specific information about the environment and sharing that information with others so that it endures over time. If, say, there are snakes in an area, it would certainly be important to distinguish the venomous ones from the harmless ones, so probably there would be separate words for those two categories of snake or at least words for each specific snake so that people could alert each other to the presence of a dangerous one.

This means that early language must have been developed relative to environmental conditions. Linguistic anthropologists are interested in the way that language varies across cultures, reflecting different environmental, historical, and sociocultural conditions. This is called linguistic relativity.

On the other hand, languages are also constrained by human anatomy and cognitive abilities. Say there were two species of snake in an area, one poisonous and the other harmless, but you could not tell them apart by looking at them. (This is actually an adaptive strategy deployed by harmless animals called adaptive mimicry.) In this case, early humans probably would have had just one word for snake, indicating that sometimes a snake’s bite made you sick and sometimes it didn’t. As this example shows, the human visual apparatus shapes our understanding of the world, which, in turn, shapes our language.

Consider another example from the natural world—the beetle. There are over 300,000 types of beetles in the world. How many can you name? All of them? Ten of them? Two of them? Outside of written scientific taxonomy, there is no language in the world that contains separate terms for each kind of beetle. This is not only because there are only a few thousand of each type of beetle living in any one environment but also because of limits to the number of terms any person can learn and remember. Our vocabulary is constrained by the limits of human memory.

So language is shaped not only by environmental conditions but also by how humans interact with their environments. Our common human anatomy influences our comprehension of the world, and that comprehension is expressed in language. This insight suggests that all languages must have some things in common by virtue of the fact that all humans have the same anatomy and cognitive abilities. Some linguistic anthropologists are interested in discovering these linguistic universals.

In the next section, we take a look at some intriguing research on both linguistic relativity and linguistic universals, seeking to better understand how language interacts with our human minds.