John H. McWhorter, “The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language” (Oxford UP, 2014)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jul 18, 2014 · 52m

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think – sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had an interesting history. It’s particularly associated with the idea that languages dismissed as primitive by 19th century thinkers, such as those of indigenous peoples in America and Australia, are not only as rich and complex as European languages (a now uncontroversial point) but also cause their speakers to conceive of reality in fundamentally different and more sophisticated ways. One problem with this idea, as John McWhorter points out in his new book The…