The Language Hoax Summary

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think, sometime referred to as Whorfianism, also known as linguistic relativity is an idea that has gained popular interest leading the belief that there has to be as many different worldviews as there are languages spoken. In the book, The Language Hoax, presented by John McWhorter, a credited linguist, contradicts the Whorfianism view by establishing his “manifesto” against the Whorfian position. McWhorter has a distinct goal to not only show the Whorfian flaws but also to establish it’s political dangers. A problem with this idea, which is discussed in McWhorter’s book is there must be ‘losers’ in order for there to be ‘winners’, losers meaning the individuals who are held back by their language (McWhorter, 2014). The ‘losers’ being the individuals who are held back by their language would be the people who group together and develop “tunnel vision” focusing solely on their worldviews and opinions.

McWhorter brings up the point that although language has been shown to influence cognitive thinking in ways, none of the discovered evidence is very

In English to describe a long period of time individuals use a long time. In Spanish, individuals say mucho tiempo, which translates to a lot of times. If a Spanish speaker were to say “a long time” it would be un tiempo largo, which is not true Spanish. In English, time is a distance but in Spanish time is and amount or size. Greek language is similar to Spanish meaning that time is stuff, something that has a possibility of having a lot of. The reason this experiment was done was to look at the metaphor for time in various languages compared to how time is used in the languages. This would show the relationship between how metaphors for time work cognitively compared to how time is used realistically in a specific