This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the complexity of the relationship between the language you speak, and the way that you perceive reality. But first, our most recent bonus episode was the results of our 2024 listener survey.

Gretchen: We learned which one of us was more “kiki” and which one of us was more “bouba.”

Lauren: Mm-hm. And we discussed the highly competitive hand gesture game of “Paper, Scissors, Rock.”

Gretchen: “You mean ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’?” – and more things that people call it cross-linguistically.

Lauren: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and almost 100 other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Ooo, 97! We’re almost at 100.

Lauren: Should we do something special for our hundredth?

Gretchen: Stay tuned to see if we do.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, I recently read the classic science fiction book Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, which people have been asking me to read for a long time.

Lauren: It’s from, like, the mid-’60s, so, for basically much longer than you’ve been a linguist (or alive) it’s been a staple of linguistic sci-fi reading.

Gretchen: Yes, this book is older than I am. You have to come to classics when you come to them. There’s no wrong time to do something like that. It sure does have a lot of linguistic elements. There’s this very cute bit where – so the characters have a lot of these interesting body modifications. This character has fangs and so can’t make a P sound.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, because I guess if you have teeth sticking out over your lips, you can’t close your lips to make a P.

Gretchen: The thing that gets me is it is explicitly said that he can’t make the P but he can make a B – and those are done with the same movement of the lips. It’s just the vocals cords which are different, which has nothing to do with where your fangs are.

Lauren: I absolutely love the linguist brain with which you read these books.

Gretchen: This was my experience of reading a lot of Babel-17 is that there’s a lot of linguistic elements that are almost doing it for me. The biggest of those is “Babel-17” itself, which in the book refers to this mysterious alien language that our poet linguist character (like, more poet linguists, that’s great) is assigned to interpret/decipher/translate/figure out from recordings. Classic linguist sci-fi story line, but Samuel Delany is one of the first people doing it.

Lauren: I was very invested in this character when I read this book ages ago.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

It’s a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you’d been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what’s the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We talk about a range of different things that people mean when they refer to this hypothesis: a sciencey-sounding way to introduce obviously fictional concepts like time travel or mind control, a reflection that we add new words all the time as convenient handles to talk about new concepts, a note that grammatical categories can encourage us to pay attention to specific areas in the world (but aren’t the only way of doing so), a social reflection that we feel like different people in different environments (which can sometimes align with different languages, though not always). We also talk about several genuine areas of human difference that linguistic relativity misses: different perceptive experiences like synesthesia and aphantasia, as well as how we lump sounds into categories based on what’s relevant to a given language.

Finally, we talk about the history of where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis comes from, why Benjamin Lee Whorf would have been great on TikTok, and why versions of this idea keep bouncing back in different guises as a form of curiosity about the human condition no matter how many specific instances get disproven.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about two sets of updates! We talk about the results from the 2024 listener survey (we learned which one of us you think is more kiki and more bouba!), and our years in review (book related news for both Lauren and Gretchen), plus exciting news for the coming year.

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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany on Goodreads
• Lingthusiasm episode on the linguistics of the movie Arrival
• History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast episode 31: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Colour words around the world and inside your brain’
• Wikipedia entry for ‘Edward Sapir’
• ‘The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ by Harry Hoijer (1954) (archive.org)
• Wikipedia entry for 'Ekkehart Malotki’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Hopi time controversy’
• 'Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003’ by Anne Mickan, Maren Schiefke, and Anatol Stefanowitsch
• 'Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky (2001)’ by Jenn-Yeu Chen
• 'Does grammatical gender affect object concepts? Registered replication of Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)’ by Nan Elpers, Greg Jensen, and Kevin J. Holmes
• 'Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution’ by Seán G. Roberts, James Winters, and Keith Chen
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘North, left, or towards the sea? Interview with Alice Gaby’
• 'Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210’ Interview by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for The Paris Review (unpaywalled photos here)

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).