Past Event

Language Diversity since the Sixteen Hundreds: From Rabelais to Boroditsky, via Boas and Whorf

Reading old and somewhat neglected literature allows us to recognize that Western debates about the importance of the diversity of human languages, including recent debates in cognitive science, have repeated similar arguments since the sixteenth century. A brief presentation of the major options will lead to that of the theoretical shift operated by Franz Boas, linguist and anthropologist, at the turn of the twentieth century and elaborated by his student Edward Sapir and Sapir’s student B.L. Whorf under the label “linguistic relativity”. Finally, we will review the more recent history of the suppression of this option and its re-emergence in what is coming to be called a “Whorfian renaissance”.

About the Presenter

John Leavitt is professor in the anthropology department of the Université de Montréal, specializing in linguistic anthropology. His doctoral research (PhD, U of Chicago) involved the recording and analysis of oral epic and religious literature of the Pahari-speaking Central Himalayan region of northern India, work that is ongoing (volume The Language of the Gods, in progress). He has also published on comparative mythology (special issue of the journal Anthropologie et Sociétés, 2005), spirit possession and its relation to language (edited volume Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration, 1997), and the history of ideas about language diversity (Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought, 2011).