Linguistic Relativity
Mutual Intelligibility between Chinese Dialects
@lisatalk_ talking about intelligibility between Chinese dialects on TikTok [Published on 02-28-2022]
Your Personality Changes When You Change Language
This video talks about those individuals that are multilingual change personalities when they change languages. This video shows in great detail how personalities all around the world are effected by changing languages. The video also talks about how only when a speaker matches their linguistic personality with their new language are they likely to be considered truly multilingual.
Irish Woman Refuses to Say Yes or No
Play videoThis video clip is a good example of the preservation of traits from older languages. Many Irish people "refuse" to say yes or no, like in the video, instead simply affirming or denying the verb. This stems from Gaelic, where the words "yes" and "no" are newer words that aren't seen as grammatical. Although many Irish people are beginning to speak only in English, characteristics from Gaelic still live on.
Patterns behind color names around the world
Play videoBerlin and Kay did a study in 1969 comparing the ways people of different native languages recognized and categorized colors. Some, like russian had words for as many as 12 color categories, while some had as few as 4. They came up with the hypothesis that they are derived in a certain order across languages, Black and white, red, green/yellow, blue, brown, then the rest. There are criticisms in this study as the sample size was small and all participants, while native speakers of a variety of languages, were bilingual english speakers. Sometimes words for color categories can come as a noun resembling the color, eg tree sap-like, ocean like. We also do this in english to describe more specific colors like the entire pantone spectrum; seafoam green, lava orange, blood red. Upon review the same researchers re-checked their methodology with more languages including unwritten ones, and a larger sample size.
Empowering Identity with Language
Play videoA YouTube blogger named Finn talks about how language can power and disempower identities. Specifically he talks about how trans individuals need to use confident language when talking about their identity. He points out the faults of expressions and phrases commonly used by the Transgender community that feed into the disempowered dialogue used by non-trans individuals. The way that we talk about ourselves not only influences the way we feel about ourselves but also how we allow others to talk about us.
Maz Jobrani: Comedy TedTalk in Qatar
Play videoMaz Jobrani is an Iranian-American who does a lot of comedy to bridge Americans with the Middle East, and to bring awareness of Middle Easterners.
Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
Play videoThis video talks about language and it's ability to allow for thought, emotion, and the expression of feelings. It talks specifically about the German language and how they have a wide variety of words they can use to better describe a situation or feeling other languages might not be able to do as effectively. It explains many examples of this, along with the appropriate meaning in English. Having a different set of words to think with and use allows for a wide variety of unique knowledge one can obtain. This video just scratches the surface of the importance of language, and how language in our lives can change the way we think and interpret the world around us.
Intertextuality: Panic! At the Disco
Play videoThe song Victorious by Panic has lyrics which mention "50 words for murder, and I am every one of them" in reference to the (false) belief that there are 50 words in Inuktitut for snow.
The Italian Man Who went to Malta.
Play videoWarning: explicit language
This hilarious video exhibits people who have different accents and ways of saying the same words in English. Because of this, there is a lot of miscommunication. There is also linguistic relativity happening in that these people speaking the same language have different meanings for the same words pronounced differently. All in all, quite a funny predicament.
Alice Walker: Fear of Being Feminine
Play videoAlice Walker is an American novelist, poet, and civil and women’s rights activist. She is best known for her critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple. In this video, she talks about the negative repercussions of referring to women as ‘guys’. The type of situation she is referencing are when someone, say a server at a restaurant, walks up to a group of women and addresses them by saying “Hi guys, how are you doing today?” Men and women both do this in America and it only perpetuates the fear of being feminine, or a female in general. With so many women still fighting for equal rights, it is crucial to be proud of being a woman and for women to not label themselves or other women as ‘guys’. This way of speaking stems from the fact that the English language is a “masculine default” language. This means that masculinity, along with masculine terms, are the default in English and other feminine terms have been unnecessarily created in order to differentiate between a male and female performing the same role. A good example of this sociolinguistic model is actor vs. actress and waiter vs. waitress. The original words are changed when talking about a woman when really, the word itself is just supposed to describe the job someone is doing. Although feminine words are added, many people still use the masculine terms by default, creating an alienation and feeling of unimportance or lack of superiority for women. Unfortunately, the aforementioned linguistic features, along with calling a group of women “guys”, are innate in most people’s vocabulary and using them can be a very difficult habit to break. Walker suggests women coming together to change the way that they label themselves and other women in order to first separate women from men and then empower those women. Although it may seem like a small step on the way to equality, it is an extremely vital one.
Language and culture
Play videoThis video shows the experience of three young people who have traveled to different places around the world. Their experiences show us how language shapes the perception and understanding of people. It is also shown that language is under major influence of culture and the ideology of different regions.
Language Learning and Transitions
Play videoTrevor Noah explains how his native language and his father's native language collide and how he tries to learn the tones, pitches and language of German and how each sound in each word can come across differently.
A Remote Amazonian tribe could fundamentally change our understanding of language
This article talks about the recent discovery of the language of a remote tribe in the Amazon that may be drastically different from any other known languages. A researcher from MIT teamed up with one of the few non-native Piraha speakers in the world to try to analyze the differences. This research may change our understanding of how language works and how it developed.
Does language shape how we think? Linguistic relativity & linguistic determinism
Play videoThis video explains and simplifies what linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism is.
Sapir-Worf
This video displays an example of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis by giving the example of a male nurse versus a female nurse. The video is only a sample.
Cinco de Mayo at the White House
Play videoIn this video President Barack Obama describes the history of Cinco de Mayo and the United States stance on the day and the celebration that occurs.
If Asians said the Stuff White People Say
Play videoThe video is a complete spoof but it does a great job of identifying how the Asian population can be categorized into one giant category. It illustrated linguistic discrimination and shows how the social context you live in can influence a culture's way of thought.
17 Reasons Americans Should Be Embarrassed They Only Speak English
This article gives insight onto why only being able to speak English, as is common to a majority of American's, is not a good thing. This article expresses how, as American's we should strive to learn other languages instead of expecting others to know ours. [Published on 03-19-2014]
Meet the Man Who Speaks 15 Languages
Play videoAlex Rawlings speaks 15 different languages, and he explains how speaking another language can provide a different perspective on life. "Languages open doors that you never knew were there."
Emotions that have no names in English
A chart of how emotions that have no names in English relate to emotions that have names in English.
Words that sound dirty in other languages
The article details how a word that is innocuous in one Language is very offensive in another. [Published on 01-02-2015]
Stephen Fry - The power of words in Nazi Germany
Play videoStephen Fry speaks about the power of language during the time of Nazi Germany and how using certain words to describe others can change everyone's perception of those people. This video significantly shows how language influences world-view.
Ricky argues Wittgenstein with Karl (The Ricky Gervais Show)
Play videoRicky Gervais and Karl Pilkington discuss Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous quote "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him." They discuss how experience is an important part of shaping meaning.
Polyglots Might Have Multiple Personalities
Nathan Collins reports that psychologists at Hong Kong Polytechnic University have found that people who speak multiple languages adopt the personality traits associated with the language they are currently speaking. [Published on 05-01-2011]
Sapir-Whorf Picture
This is an image that helps explain the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The image is an example of how thoughts can be determined by the language in which you speak. This example shows Inuit being perplexed at the fact that language has so many variations for the word "no." The local area newspaper is titled "English have 10 times as many negative words," showing that certain words can have a wide variety of meaning in different cultures/languages.
Debunking Whorfianism
This powerful message about identifying with Veganism principles shows a correlation between the discrimination of diversity in relation to language and Whorfianism. Marla Rose supports some core ideas from John McWhorter's book "The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language". [Published on 02-11-2015]
I got corrected on my color names
I was having a discussion with my friend Daphne when another friend of mine, August, walked up. The following discussion happened:
Daphne: I like the color of your shirt!
Me: Yeah, it's a nice minty color
August: Actually, it's sea foam...
Me: THIS SUDDENLY BECAME VERY RELEVANT TO MY EDUCATION
To be clear, August is a heterosexual cis-man. Maybe it's his inner academic that encouraged his exotic color usage.
How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World
This article talks about the connection between a language and one's way of viewing the world. It also suggests a change in the way we teach language--providing activities which help students view this new language threw the lens of the world to which it's connected. [Published on 01-02-2014]
Do You See What I See?
From about 1:20-5:00 the film crew focuses on the Himba tribe, who have half as many color terms as we do. This seems like it gets at the idea in the Bourdieu chapter that language without objectification and codification exists to have functionality. It also seems to me that finding out related phenomena like this is another benefit of not being prescriptive in our language use. [Published on 08-11-2011]
Radiolab: Why isn't the sky blue?
A 2013 Radiolab episode that begins with a study demonstrating that Homer had no word for blue, and goes to discuss research on the ordering of cross-linguistic color terminology, a classic area of study in early theories of linguistic relativity.