ABSTRACT
It is now a truism to suggest that the ‘speech’ 2 of a culture shapes the experiences of its members and orders their construction of reality. With acute insight but inelegant phraseology, Wright Mills once wrote of language in this sense, that ‘socially built and maintained, it embodies implicit exhortations and social evaluations. By acquiring the categories of a language, we acquire the structured “ways’ of a group, and along with the language, the value implates of those “ways”.’ He continued:
Our behaviour and perception, our logic and thought, come within the control of a system of language. Along with language, we acquire a set of social norms and values. A vocabulary is not merely a string of words; immanent within it are societal textures – institutional and political co-ordinates. Back of a vocabulary lie sets of collective action. 3
More simply, B. L. Whorf expressed the same belief in the relativity of thought as an outcome of sub-cultural language experience in his discussion of the difference of perception reflected in the speech patterns of standard American English and Hopi. 4 ‘The statement,’ he reminded his readers, ‘that thinking is a matter of “language” is an incorrect generalization of the more nearly correct idea that thinking is a matter of different tongues.’ 5