Five years after Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916, published after his death), another introduction to linguistics appeared on the far side of the Atlantic: Edward Sapir’s Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921). Sapir was a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas and a prolific describer of Native American languages — an anthropologist-linguist. The book is a slim 130 pages, almost free of phonetic symbols and technical vocabulary. Its aim, as the preface says, is “to give a certain perspective on the subject of language rather than to assemble facts about it.”
That perspective resolves into a handful of strong claims.
1. Speech is not an instinct
Move a newborn into an alien society and it will walk “very much as it would have developed it in the old” environment. But its speech “will be completely at variance with the speech of its native environment.” Hence: “Walking is an organic, an instinctive, function …; speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, ‘cultural’ function” (ch. 1).
From this comes the famous definition:
Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. (ch. 1)
Interjections (oh! ah!) and imitative words (cuckoo) are only cultural imitations of instinctive cries, not the origin of speech: “at best” an interjection is “a decorative edging to the ample, complex fabric.” On the physiological side Sapir presses further: “There are, properly speaking, no organs of speech; there are only organs that are incidentally useful in the production of speech sounds.” The lungs are for breathing, the teeth for chewing. Speech is “an overlaid function.”
2. The essence is pattern, not sound
Spoken language can be transferred, point for point, into writing, into gesture, into Morse code (a “symbol of a symbol of a symbol”). The very ease of this transfer shows that “the mere sounds of speech are not the essential fact of language, which lies rather in the classification, in the formal patterning, and in the relating of concepts.” In Sapir’s phrase: “language, as a structure, is on its inner face the mold of thought” (ch. 1).
Language and thought follow from this. Language is “primarily a pre-rational function”; thought is “the highest latent or potential content of speech.” The two are not the same but are inseparable: “the instrument makes possible the product, the product refines the instrument.” A word is a “key” to a concept — and also a “fetter.”
3. Form and function are separate things
Chapters 4–5 keep showing that form (which method) and function (which concept) are relatively independent. English plural can be -s, or geese, or sheep, or oxen; vowel change serves both plural (goose/geese) and tense (sing/sang). “Pattern is one thing, the utilization of pattern quite another.”
The same relativity reaches the parts of speech. If “it reddens” is a verb, “red” can be a verb too; in “the height of a building” a quality wears the accent of a thing. “The ‘part of speech’ reflects not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns” (ch. 5). The one near-universal distinction is noun vs. verb — because “speech consists of a series of propositions”: there must be something to talk about and something said about it.
Then chapter 6 discards the old evolutionary ranking of languages (“isolating → agglutinative → inflective”), rooted in the Eurocentric conviction that Latin and Greek are the peak. Sapir’s line: “A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoologist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.” “Every language is a form language.”
4. A language drifts on its own
Chapter 7, “Drift,” is the book’s most influential. “Language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has a drift.” Drift is not random individual variation but “the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction.” A language has a “slope”; the changes of coming centuries are prefigured in obscure tendencies of the present.
Sapir’s celebrated prophecy: our faint reluctance to say “Whom did you see?” is four unconscious forces — form symmetry, the feeling that interrogatives should be invariable, word order, and phonetic rhythm — “canalized into a single force.” So: “It is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred years from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying ‘Whom did you see?’” The folk that says “Who did you see?” without a twinge “has a more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students.”
Dialects arise when groups drift apart independently. “Dialect, language, branch, stock … are purely relative terms,” convertible as our perspective widens or contracts.
5. Language, race and culture are separate
Chapter 10. The distributions of race, language and culture “intercross in the most bewildering fashion.” “Race, in its only intelligible, that is biological, sense, is supremely indifferent to the history of languages and cultures.” Slogans like “Slavophilism, Anglo-Saxondom, Teutonism, and the Latin genius” are “sentimental creeds.” English is spoken by many races — for Black Americans it is “as much their property, as inalienably ‘theirs,’ as the King of England’s.”
Nor are language and culture causally linked. “Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought.” Cultural change is a shift in “a selected inventory of experience”; linguistic drift is a change in “formal expression.” Hence: “When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.” Vocabulary mirrors culture, and only that: “The linguistic student should never make the mistake of identifying a language with its dictionary.”
The summary line: “The latent content of all languages is the same — the intuitive science of experience. It is the manifest form that is never twice the same.” Therefore “language can no more flow from race as such than can the sonnet form.”
6. Language is a collective art
The last chapter is on literature. Literary art has two layers: (1) a generalized, non-linguistic art that survives translation (Shakespeare; deep symbolism), and (2) an art specific to one language that does not (Swinburne). “A work of literary art can never be translated” (Croce) — yet it does get translated, because the deeper layer is itself a translation from “a generalized language … a symbolic algebra of which all known languages are translations.” Shakespeare and Heine fuse both layers: “With Heine … one is under the illusion that the universe speaks German.”
Style is not an absolute but “merely the language itself, running in its natural grooves.” Prosody, too, comes from a language’s sound dynamics: “Latin and Greek verse depends on the principle of contrasting weights; English verse, on the principle of contrasting stresses; French verse, on the principles of number and echo; Chinese verse, on the principles of number, echo, and contrasting pitches.”
The book closes: “Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”
In sum
| Sapir’s claim | Where |
|---|---|
| Language is culture, not instinct; physiologically an “overlaid function”; its essence is pattern, not sound | ch. 1 |
| Form (method) and function (concept) are independent; even parts of speech are language-relative | ch. 4–5 |
| The evolutionary ranking of language types is Eurocentric prejudice; every language is a form language | ch. 6 |
| A language drifts autonomously; change has direction and is prefigured in the present | ch. 7–8 |
| Language, race and culture are independent variables; the “racial genius” is a myth | ch. 9–10 |
| Language is a collective art; style and prosody are outcrops of a language’s own dynamics | ch. 11 |
Why it is still read
- Sound pattern (ch. 3) — the idea of an “ideal system” behind the objective sounds leads straight to phonemics (Prague School, American structuralism) and rhymes with Saussure’s value-as-difference.
- Linguistic relativity — the “mold of thought” of ch. 1 and “language as a how of thought” of ch. 10 are a source of the later Sapir–Whorf hypothesis; but this Sapir also says the “latent content” of every language is the same, so it is no naive determinism.
- Typology — the multi-axis classification of ch. 6 anticipates modern linguistic typology.
- Against linguistic racism — ch. 10 remains an antidote to twentieth-century talk of a “national genius” in language.
The companion book of the same era, Saussure’s Course, is covered in “Overview”, “Explained, Part 1” and “Langage, langue, parole”. Where Saussure turns inward to the logic of the system, Sapir sets language among culture, history, race and art — and the two arrive independently at the same intuition: that form is difference, not substance.
