THE VALUE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis asserts that (1) the native language determines how a person views the world and (2) that he is unaware of his mental entrapment if he remains monolingual.  Thus the American who grows up speaking only English is never conscious of how thoroughly his ability to think is circumscribed by the way his language compels him to structure his thoughts.  Just as a deep-sea creature would be unaware of the nature of water because he has never experienced non-water, a monolingual American is unaware of the nature of English because he has had no significant contact with non-English.  His ethnocentric mind set traps him into believing that English is the only reasonable way to express reality.  Actually, English, like all languages, causes distortions by the way it structures expression.  For example, the language of the Hopi Indians is more accurate than English in expressing certain natural processes.  In English we say,

John is dying.

The Hopi language, by contrast, would say something like,

Dying is taking place in John.

The Hopi more accurately express the fact that John is really not doing anything, whereas the Anglo-American, by the very nature of how his language symbolizes actions in the “real” world, is forced to attribute agent power to John even though John is passively, and perhaps unwillingly, taking part in the process of dying.

From the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis it follows that the study of a second language is essential to understanding what language is all about.  The American student can develop a clearer understanding of his native English by comparing it with a non-English communication system.  But this understanding can come only by means of a thorough immersion in the language of a non-Anglo-Saxon culture.  A sampling of “general language” will not suffice—language is far too complex to be profitably sampled.  The American student must be taught to communicate through direct immersion in a totally new system of oral and written symbols.  He must to some degree become conversant in the mother tongue of some non-Anglo-American culture.

Among others who cite the anthropological value of language study are people from a variety of disciplines.  William R. Parker, whose background is English, comments as follows:  “Learning a foreign language is an educational experience.  By acquiring even a limited skill, which may or may not be retained, the individual finds himself personally breaking the barriers of a single speech and a single culture—experiencing another culture at first-hand in the symbols through which it expresses its realities”

Marshall J. Walker, a professor of physics, says:  “The main value to education of the study of a foreign language lies in its unique contribution to an understanding of the principles of the communication of thought.  A basic aim of all serious education is a comprehension of the distinction between a concept and the words, or symbols, used to describe the concept.  The person with only one language is at a hopeless disadvantage in such a task.”

The author, G.H. Fisher, puts it more strongly:  “The American will never really penetrate the thinking of people in a new country until he has first penetrated the language which carries, reflects, and molds the thoughts and ideas of that people.”

“He who knows no foreign language has never really learned his own”—Goethe