We have the overview of Sapir’s Language, its two-part walkthrough (one, two), and drift. Here is the book’s other core: language, race and culture are independent of one another. Chapters 9–10.
1. The three divisions intercross
Anthropology maps a region by three measures — race, language, culture: racial divisions, language families, culture areas. What historians and anthropologists found is that the three “are not distributed in parallel fashion” — their areas of distribution “intercross in the most bewildering fashion” (ch. 10).
Races intermingle; languages do not, “in the same way.” A language may spread far beyond its home into new races and new culture spheres — it may even “live on among peoples violently hostile to the persons of its original speakers.”
2. Race is indifferent to the history of language
Race … is supremely indifferent to the history of languages and cultures. (ch. 10)
Slogans like “Slavophilism, Anglo-Saxondom, Teutonism, and the Latin genius” are, against the “driest of commentaries” that is the history of linguistic distributions, mere “sentimental creeds.” English is spoken by all three white races of Europe; in America “several millions of negroes … know no other language” — “It is as much their property, as inalienably ‘theirs,’ as the King of England’s.” And the historical core of English speakers, the English themselves, are “an amalgam of many distinct strains”: the “Anglo-Saxon” (North German) base plus Norman French, Scandinavian, Celtic and pre-Celtic.
This is the linguistic side of the anthropology of Sapir’s teacher Franz Boas, whose The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) argued that race, language and culture each vary independently, cutting the ground from under the “scientific racism” of the day.
3. Language and culture are not causally linked either
Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. (ch. 10)
The drift of culture is a change in “a selected inventory of experience” — additions, losses, shifts of emphasis. The drift of language is “changes in formal expression” and not of content at all. “One can change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten gold.”
So every attempt to tie a type of linguistic morphology to a “stage” of cultural development is vain. “Rightly understood, such correlations are rubbish.”
4. Plato walks with the swineherd
When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam. (ch. 10)
Both simple and complex languages are spoken at every level of cultural advance. There is no correlation between the height of a civilisation and the complexity of its linguistic form. For Sapir “the latent content of all languages is the same — the intuitive science of experience,” and only the manifest form is never twice alike. Hence:
language can no more flow from race as such than can the sonnet form. (ch. 10)
Sapir also dismisses “temperament”: there is no evidence that a language’s form has any connection with national temperament. Its drift “runs inexorably in the channel ordained for it by its historic antecedents; it is as regardless of the feelings and sentiments of its speakers as is the course of a river of the atmospheric humors of the landscape.”
5. Vocabulary reflects culture — but a dictionary is not a language
Of course vocabulary reflects culture. “A society that has no knowledge of theosophy need have no name for it”; people who had never seen a horse had to invent or borrow a word for it. “In the sense that the vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully reflects the culture whose purposes it serves it is perfectly true that the history of language and the history of culture move along parallel lines.” But this is “superficial and extraneous.”
The linguistic student should never make the mistake of identifying a language with its dictionary. (ch. 10)
6. Where the divisions coincide, it is historical accident
For the Eskimo and the Bushmen the lines of race, language and culture do coincide fairly sharply. But that is not “an inherent psychological relation between the three factors”; it is “a readily intelligible historical association” — long-isolated groups, so all three diverged together.
Chapter 9 points the same way. Languages influence each other mainly by borrowing words (English’s layers of Latin, French, Scandinavian). Sounds are borrowed too, but borrowing of morphology is rare and superficial.
Language is probably the most self-contained, the most massively resistant of all social phenomena. It is easier to kill it off than to disintegrate its individual form. (ch. 9)
In sum
| Sapir’s separation | |
|---|---|
| Race, language and culture are independent variables | distributions “intercross in the most bewildering fashion” |
| Race is indifferent to the history of language | “language can no more flow from race than can the sonnet form” |
| Language and culture are not causally linked | culture = inventory changing; language = a mold. “Plato walks with the swineherd” |
| Vocabulary reflects culture — but that is the dictionary | do not confuse a language with its dictionary |
| Coincidences are historical accident | language is “the most self-contained, the most massively resistant” of social phenomena |
Sapir closes chapter 10: “Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”
Why it still matters: these two chapters carry Boas’s rejection of scientific racism onto the ground of language, and remain a working antidote to twentieth-century talk of a “national spirit” or a “racial gift for language.”
What remains: from the sound pattern to the phoneme (a closer look at chapter 3) and language and literature (chapter 11). For the overview, see “Reading Edward Sapir’s Language”.
