John H. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, and a fascinating and sometimes controversial figure. For instance, although he describes himself as “a cranky liberal Democrat,” he also wrote a book, Losing the Race, which claims that African American culture is partly to blame for the relatively poor performance of African Americans in school and work life. That book made him popular with conservatives, and led the Manhattan Institute to name him a contributing editor to its publication City Journal. On the other hand, he is a vigorous defender of “Black English” as a perfectly valid form of English, just as grammatical as “standard” American English. (That is a position that traditionalist conservatives ought to embrace, first of all because it is correct, and secondly because it recognizes the priority of concrete ways of life over abstract rules. But alas, too many conservatives have mistaken the position of nineteenth-century grammar rationalists as being conservative.)
In addition to these positions that have brought him into the public eye, McWhorter is a serious linguist, specializing in language change and Creole languages, and conversant in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, and Hebrew. In The Language Hoax, McWhorter takes on an important and contentious view that has been kicking around linguistics and the social sciences since at least the eighteenth century, a theory which has sometimes been called the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (itself a controversial term). The theory is popular enough that it played a central role in the major motion picture Arrival, where it was explicitly mentioned by name. The essence of the theory is that the worldview of we humans is … well, here things get murky: determined by? strongly influenced by? somewhat influenced by? … the language we speak.
Read Full Article »