languages as sharing so many structural features that he named this whole group of languages Standard Average European (SAE). According to Whorf, Hopi and SAE differ widely in their structural characteristics. For example, Hopi grammatical categories provide a ‘process’ orientation toward the world, whereas the categories in SAE give SAE users a fixed orientation toward time and space. In SAE, events occur, have occurred, or will occur, in a definite time, that is, present, past, or future; to users of Hopi, what is important is whether an event can be warranted to have occurred, or to be occurring, or to be expected to occur. Whorf believed that these differences lead users of Hopi and SAE to view the world differently. The Hopi see the world as essentially an ongoing set of processes; time is not apportioned into fixed segments so that certain things recur, for example, minutes, mornings, and days. In contrast, users of SAE regard nearly everything in their world as discrete, measurable, countable, and recurrent; time and space do not flow into each other; mornings recur in twenty‐four‐hour cycles; and past, present, and future are factual ways of viewing events. (We should note that Malotki (1983) has pointed out that some of Whorf’s claims about the grammatical structure of Hopi are either dubious or incorrect, for example, Hopi, like SAE, does have verbs that are inflected for tense.)
Deutscher (2010a, 2010b) has revisited the Whorf hypothesis, noting some of the obvious problems with this hypothesis: ‘If the inventory of readymade words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?’ However, he further discusses some recent research which provides evidence for the connection between language and worldview. One example is that users of a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, do not make use of any egocentric coordinates (i.e., deictic words such as ‘left,’ ‘right,’ ‘behind,’ ‘in front of’) but instead rely solely on the cardinal directions of east, west, north, and south. Research on this language prompted recognition of the same phenomenon in languages of other far‐flung places such as Bali, Namibia, and Mexico. Deutscher uses this research not to make strong claims about linguistic determinism, but to urge readers to recognize linguistic relativity, advising us that ‘as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.’
More recently, McWhorter (2014) argued against the Whorf hypothesis, with a book written for a popular audience titled The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. His main point seems to be that the differences between groups are cultural, and not determined by language. This book has not been well received by linguistic anthropologists, as can be seen in Webster’s (2015) review. Nonetheless, a shared perspective seems to be a rejection of the neo‐Whorfian interest of experimentally testing differences of perception across users of different languages. McWhorter’s point is that if there is an effect of language on thought, it is minor; Webster’s is that different languages have different poetic potentials and this, and not some abstract idea about ‘thought,’ is what is interesting about the influence of language on our worldview. In the next section, we will move on from the question of the direction of influence to the discussion of the nature of connections between linguistic features and social variables in sociolinguistic research.
Exploration 1.4 Translatability
If you speak more than one language or dialect, are there certain words or phrases which you feel you cannot translate into Standard English? What are these words or phrases – are they simply words for things which are not part of the cultures of the English‐speaking world, or concepts or idioms not found in English? What does the view of particular words as ‘untranslatable’ indicate about the connection between language and worldview?
Correlations
It is possible to claim a relationship between the use of certain features of language and social structure, and such correlational studies have long formed a significant part of sociolinguistic work. Gumperz (1971, 223) has observed that sociolinguistics is an attempt to find correlations between social structure and linguistic structure and to observe any changes that occur. The approach to sociolinguistics which focuses on such correlations and the quantitative analysis of them is often called variationist sociolinguistics, and the theory and methodology of this will be discussed in chapter 5.
It is important to note that correlation only shows a relationship between two variables; it does not show causation. To find that X and Y are related is not necessarily to discover that X causes Y (or Y causes X). For example, to find that female language users use more standard features than male language users in a given community does not prove that being female causes someone to speak in a more standard manner (see chapter 5 for a discussion of how such findings have been interpreted, and chapter 11 for a broader discussion of language and gender). We must always exercise caution when we attempt to draw conclusions from such relationships.
As noted by Eckert (2012), although first and second wave variationist sociolinguistic studies focused on such correlations of specific variables and static social categories, third wave variation study embraces the ideas about language as a means for constructing social identities, not reflecting them (see chapter 5 for a deeper discussion of the three waves of research). These different ideas about the role of language in society, and society in language, reflect the multiple influences from different academic fields of study on contemporary sociolinguistics; this is the topic of the next section.
The Interdisciplinary Legacy of Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics has grown out of ideas presented by scholars from different traditions, most notably linguistics, sociology, and anthropology, although some key figures in its development also came from the field of education (see Wodak et al. 2011 for a more detailed overview of this). There is a general distinction between micro‐sociolinguistics and macro‐sociolinguistics (which has also been called the sociology of language). In this distinction, macro‐sociolinguistics includes such topics as language policy and planning, societal patterns of language use (especially in multilingual contexts) and intercultural communication, while micro‐sociolinguistics looks, as the name implies, at the smaller details of interactions – the structure of conversation, the use of specific linguistic variables and their variants, and the variation of these aspects of language across different social contexts.
A further distinction which is sometimes made is that between sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. A number of scholars (Duranti 2003; Gumperz and Cook‐Gumperz 2008; Bucholtz and Hall 2008) have noted the fuzziness of the distinction between these two fields, arguing that there is considerable overlap in theory, themes, methodologies, and history. Ethnography of communication (which will be discussed in detail in chapter 6) has long been an area of overlap between these two fields (and others); this approach examines languages as a system of cultural behavior. Current approaches to the study of identities and language ideologies also blur the distinction between sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In chapter 6, we will discuss several ethnographic approaches which focus on language in society, including ethnography of communication. This is qualitative research and thus methodologically very different from quantitative variationist work; it also tends to address the question of the social meaning of language use less in terms of correlation with the social categories associated with the language user, and more in terms of how people use language to carry out their social lives (including but not limited to positioning themselves as members of particular social categories). Further, other approaches to discourse analysis (the broad term used to discuss methods that look at language use at a level beyond the utterance) which have similar
