![]() (Orwell was a contemporary of Whorf, though it’s unclear if he knew Whorf’s writing). Another perennially popular source for it is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Not all versions of the idea that idea that language determines thought are directly indebted to Sapir and Whorf. And a few years later, as I explained in an earlier post, the feminist linguist and sci-fi writer Suzette Haden Elgin made it the premise of a series of novels, for which she also created an alternative ‘women’s language’. In 1980 Dale Spender invoked it to support her thesis that women were oppressed by having to view the world through the lens of a ‘man made language’. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has also been of interest to feminists. Some propositions based on it have been around forever, repeated so often they’ve passed into received wisdom (like the indestructible zombie fact about Eskimos having a lot of words for snow-they don’t, but even if they did, as Geoff Pullum says in his classic debunking piece ‘ The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax’, why would that be any more significant than printers having a lot of words for fonts?) Others, testifying to its continuing vitality, have popped up more recently (remember the headline-making claim from 2013, that people save more if their language lacks a future tense?) Most linguists rejected the ‘strong’ version of the hypothesis long ago (though ‘weak’ versions continue to be debated), but that hasn’t prevented it from being endlessly recycled in popular culture, often in crassly simplistic ways. People in my line of work tend to approach anything based on this premise with caution. For one thing, I’ve never been a great fan of the ‘aliens have landed’ genre for another, I’d read that Arrival leans heavily on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a 20 th century theory which says that your perceptions of reality are influenced-or in the strongest version of the theory, determined-by the characteristics of the language you speak. I wasn’t expecting to love it in fact, when I first heard about it I thought I’d probably give it a miss. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license ( CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).Last week I saw Arrival, the recently-released film with Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a linguist recruited by the US military to decode the language of some non-humanoid aliens who have unexpectedly arrived on earth. Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. Lauren is on Twitter as superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo. Gretchen is on Twitter as GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. You can listen to this episode via, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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