Linguistic Relativity vs Universalism

     Hello to everyone! After a long break, I finally found time to share a post! I haven't been able to share any post for a long time because it was the last year of my university, I was involved in a training period and lots of assignments. All this made me very busy and I am also preparing for the exam called KPSS conducted in order to start work as a teacher in public schools in Turkey. After all these explanations, let's go back to our main topic!
     

First of all, I would like to briefly talk about what Universalism and Linguistic Relativity are. First, let's take Universalism. In this view put forward by Chomsky, people are born with an innate ability to acquire and speak a language, that is, language acquisition is in human biological equipment. He has suggested that there are parameters and principles for all languages. An example of principles is the presence of small parts like subjects and verbs in all languages ​​that serve to form sentences. The parameters are how the different languages ​​place the subject and verbs, and even the object in the sentence, that is, which word order they prefer to follow. On the other hand, Sapir and Whorf put forward linguistic relativism and linguistic determinism ideas. According to the idea of ​​linguistic relativism, individuals experience the world according to the structure of the language they use as a habit, that is, language differences cause differences in the minds of people who use that language and argue that these differences cause non-language cognitive differences between people. Linguistic determinism, on the other hand, argues that the structure of the language spoken by people affects the way the individual perceives and makes sense of the world of perception, the structure of human cognition is determined by the categories and structures that already exist in the language, and at the end of all this limits human thought. So why did I explain all this? 

Many linguists tried to explain the following dilemma in the 19th and 20th centuries; Does our language affect our thoughts and our view of the world, or is it the opposite? Or do our thoughts affect our language and our view of the world? One of my final assignments was to interpret the excerpt below in terms of relativity. In interpreting this quote, I tried to explain it by comparing the view of linguistic relativity and universalism.

''Human beings and their cultures can be quite creative and imaginative - almost limitless, it would appear at first glance, but we cannot think about anything without restraint.''

    From the very first moment of its existence, man has created his own culture with his language, values, common experiences, customs and traditions, clothing style and music he listened and many other components. There are billions of people in the world and naturally there are countless different cultures created by these people. These people always carry traces of their culture in which they were born and raised, whether they want it or not. Whether they are aware or not, they may act according to their own culture and evaluate the events around them with perceptions that have passed from their own culture to their way of thinking. In fact, the main reason for the existence of many different cultures may be not only the result of people's creativity and imagination but also their language, which helps them to perceive and interpret events and situations in the outside world.

   Different languages ​​interpret everything that happens in the world differently, and as a result, different people who speak these different languages ​​think differently. For example, when we express the same events or situations in different cultures, we use different proverbs and idioms. For example, A Turkish person says ''Bardaktan boşalırcasına yağmur yağıyor.'' while a British person says ''It is raining cats and dogs.''. Why do a British and a Turkish explain the same weather by forming different sentences and using different idioms? While to say that the rain is raining heavily, do the British think that cats or dogs are falling from the air, or the Turks think that water is pouring from the glass? Of course not. The structure and lexicon of the person's language cause linguistic differences, which causes systematic cognitive differences in one's perception and interpretation of the world. Concrete contexts used by people of different cultures when interpreting the same events also cause different cognitive differences. That is why people who generalize and classify events in different ways express these events differently.

    From a linguistic perspective, it is known that there are parameters and principles in language. According to the Universal Grammatical view, there are subjects, objects and verbs in every language. When I construct the sentence with the subject, object and verb word order, I can write a Turkish poem;  when I construct the sentence with the subject, verb, object word order I can write an Italian poem; when I construct the sentence with the object, subject, verb word order, I can write a Hungarian poem and contribute to my culture. So what is the reason for these differences in word order? We can say that in some languages people emphasize the subject, some languages emphasize the verb or people in other languages choose to keep the object in the foreground because they see the object more important. In my German poem, "Eine Alte Frau" is expressed in this way, while in my Turkish poetry it is referred to as "yaşlı bir kadın". What causes the sequence of adjective phrases in two languages ​​to be used differently? I will leave a legacy to my culture by writing my poem, but without realizing it, I form sentences to the extent that the strings that my language encodes allow me. I can creatively form my poetry as I want, I can enrich my culture, but I can only create it by sticking to how my language allows me and how it helps me to perceive the outside world. Without even noticing, I arrange the sentences and phrases according to a certain sequence in my language that they are classified in my head and I can leave a product to my culture according to these classifications. I am both free and captive at the same time. Let's say that a poet from the New Guinean tribe, an English poet, a Russian poet, a German poet, and a Turkish poet gather in a room. Let's ask these poets to write a poem consisting of 2 quatrains about nature. The first differences in these poems will arise in the word order of the sentences, the various affixes used in the sentence, or how the phrases are ordered in themselves. Then let them put a blue flower on the table and ask poets to write a poem, considering the beauty of its color. While some of the poets pointed out the color of this flower as dark or light in their poetry, some write their poems by describing them only as blue without going into detail. Why did some poets specifically indicate whether the color was light or dark, despite all the poems were written for the same blue flower? Let's ask the same authors to write a poem that now depicts the same flower based on their location. While the German poet writes his poetry with an egocentric position, the English writer will depict the flower with an object-centric position. In the poem of the German poet, we can find a line like ‘‘beautiful blue flower standing on my right’’, and in the poem of the English poet, a line like ‘beautiful blue flower on the table’’. Let's put several pencils, a parrot, five butterflies and some water next to the flower. While some of the poets explicitly state the numbers or quantities of these objects in their poems, some poets will be selective when specifying the number or amount of objects and do not care about the number and quantity of some objects. In these cases, it would not be wrong to say that the language we speak has an effect on color cognition, number cognition, and how people position objects.

    In short, the language we speak has an impact on our effort to make sense of the outside world. From our perception of colors to positioning objects, from our perception of time to the concept of grammatical gender in the language, we can find examples that support how language affects our thoughts and guides us. Language is a factor for us on what to look out for in the outside world and how to make sense of them and create our culture. Our language plays an important role in our cognitive perception and categorization of both cultural and linguistic coding. As our language affects us, we create different cultures by making different generalizations and classifications even for the same events. Although some features are common in all languages, how these common features are shaped and interpreted in language differs from culture to culture and from language to language. The structure of our language and how we encode verbal labels that we prefer to express lexical items in order to remember events, later on, can lead us to a common point where our culture, our cognitive coding, the way how we think, and our language intersect. Although universal events in the world and some universal features in the language that enable us to express these events try to keep us together, language establishes some cognitive mindsets that will create cultural differences and shape our perception.

I hope this post will be useful to you, if you liked it and it really benefited you, please mention it in the comments! Take care, see you soon!