I.

Language and Perception

1. Verbal hygiene

Definition: Verbal hygiene is the thought-provoking term used by Deborah

Cameron to describe how people respond to “the urge to meddle in matters of
language."
It covers a wide range of activities, from writing Letters to the Editor complaining
about the “deterioration” and “abuse” of language.
Through prescriptions and proscriptions about what constitutes “proper”,
“correct” and “acceptable” usage in a range of contexts, to using language as a
political weapon.
A common example of verbal hygiene is the deliberate adoption of non-sexist
language, which challenges traditional assumptions about gender roles.
The deliberate adoption of overtly non-sexist usages often leads to accusations of
“political correctness”.
[Activity – "What’s in a Word?" (Non-Sexist Language)]
Instructions:
On the screen, you’ll see pairs of gendered and neutral terms:
Chairman vs. Chairperson
Policeman vs. Police officer
Fireman vs. Firefighter
Take a moment to reflect:
What mental image or assumption does each term create?
Does the neutral term feel more inclusive? Why or why not?
→ This activity highlights how verbal hygiene can reflect efforts to make

language more inclusive and equitable.

For example:
Replacing "chairman" with "chairperson" or "fireman" with "firefighter" aims to
challenge stereotypes and promote gender equality.
Example:
1. Verbal hygiene extends beyond gender-neutral terms. Consider how doctors
use language to describe patients and treatments:

• impersonal and detached tone: Using passive constructions like “it is said that” or
“surgery is indicated” obscures accountability, influencing how patients perceive
their care.
• neatly avoid drawing attention to reasons for the failure of the treatment to
control symptoms.
• Hysterectomy is described as the treatment of choice, allowing the author
to avoid identifying whose choice it is.

2. Autism
• The debate over person-first language (person with autism) versus disability-first
language (autistic person) highlights how language reflects societal attitudes:
Person-First Language ("Person with Autism")
Definition: Puts the individual before the condition, emphasizing their humanity
over their disability (e.g., "person with autism" or "person with ASD").
→ This approach is based on the idea that autism is just one aspect of a person’s

identity and does not define them.

Disability-First Language ("Autistic Person")
Definition: Centers autism as a core part of identity.(e.g., "autistic person").
Many in the autistic community prefer this approach, viewing autism as integral to
who they are.
→ Important to consult people about what they want to be called, how they

want to be addressed.
● Coots and coconuts for ethnic minorities and queer and gay for homosexual
• relationship between language, society, attitudes, and perception. Labels are not
just descriptors—they shape relationships, social attitudes, and cultural narratives.
→ It is important to reflect on the effects such labels may have on young

people’s attitudes and ways of thinking about members of such groups.

2. Whorf

2.1. The relationship between language and thought:

● Vocabulary and cognition

→ There is a close relationship between language and perception.

Among linguists, the person whose name is most closely associated with
investigations of the relationship between language and thought is Benjamin Lee
Whorf. Whorf was an anthropological linguist who began his career as a chemical
engineer working for an insurance company.
He first investigated Native American languages as a hobby, but later studied with
Edward Sapir at Yale University.
In the course of processing insurance claims, he noticed that the particular words
selected to describe or label objects often influenced people’s perceptions and
behaviour. In English, there is a single word for "snow," but the Inuit languages
have multiple terms for different kinds of snow, The Inuit have numerous words
for snow, reflecting the variety of snow conditions they encounter in their
environment. Examples include words for:
Qaniq: Falling snow
Aput: Snow on the ground
Pukak: Powdery snow
This extensive vocabulary enables the Inuit to perceive and respond to subtle
differences in snow types, which are crucial for survival in Arctic climates
Whorf’s famous quote explains this relationship: the world is presented in a
kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized in our minds – and
this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.
The agreement is implicit and unstated - BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY
OBLIGATORY.
→ In other words, our minds shape raw reality into organized categories

through language.
This implicit agreement within a speech community dictates how we communicate
and perceive the world—and it’s obligatory.

2.2. The relationship between language and thought

Thank you My Duyen for explaining how language and perception are connected.
Now, I’ll talk about the second point of how language shapes the way we think and
see the world through the lens of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s work that is linguistic
determinism: the medium is the message.

Linguistic determinism: the medium is the message

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:

Developed in 1929 by Edward Sapir, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that a
person’s perception of the world around them and how they experience the world
is both determined and influenced by the language that they speak.
● Linguistic Determinism: Language Shapes Perception

Linguistic Determinism is the strong form of this hypothesis, which claims

that language determines the way people think, perceive, and understand the
world. According to this theory, speakers of different languages will think
differently because of the language they speak.

When exploring the grammar of the Hopi language, he concluded that the Hopi
have an entirely different concept of time than European languages do because
the Hopi language lacks specific tense markers like those in English.

Whorf claimed that a Hopi speaker would experience the world in a

fundamentally different way than an English speaker due to differences in their
languages.

● Linguistic Relativity:
Linguistic Relativity is the weaker form, suggesting that language influences
cognition, but it doesn’t fully determine how we think. This suggests that language
doesn’t fully determine how we think, but it can influence the way we perceive and
categorize the world around us.

One interesting study found that the Dani people of New Guinea, despite
having only two words for colors (black and white), could still distinguish
between subtle shades of color like light blue and turquoise. This suggests that
language doesn’t entirely limit cognitive abilities, though it still plays a role.

Other examples:
 Another interesting example comes from Navajo children, who tend to
categorize objects based on shape (long, short, round, etc.) rather than color,
unlike English-speaking children who group objects by color. This shows how
language can shape the way children categorize and think about objects.

Another example concerns numeracy: research suggests that children who

speak Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tend to grasp number concepts earlier
than children who speak English or French.

This could be because languages like Chinese have a more logical structure for
number words, such as “eleven” in Chinese being shi-yi (ten-one), making it
easier for children to understand numbers beyond ten. This provides further
support for the idea that language can facilitate certain types of thinking and
learning.

2.3. The relationship between language and thought

Grammar and cognition

- Grammatical Categories:

When we think about grammar, we often talk about things like tense, aspect, and
gender. These are important because they don’t just help us structure sentences—
they actually shape how we see and understand the world around us. Different
languages use these categories in different ways, and that affects how speakers of
those languages think about reality.

- Hopi’s Verb System:

Hopi conception of time is different from that of the western culture.

He said that Hopi verbs don’t focus on when something happens—whether it's in
the past, present, or future—but rather on how something happens, like the process
or the action itself. This led Whorf to suggest that the Hopi see time differently.
Instead of thinking about time as a straight line, like we do in many Western
cultures, they think about time in a more cyclical way, as a repeating flow of
events.

Grammaticalization
Grammaticalization is when words evolve into grammatical elements like affixes
or auxiliary verbs. Whorf believed that languages encode aspects of reality based
on cultural significance. For instance, languages with less technological
development may have fewer color terms but more complex classification systems
for pronouns and nouns.
II. Linguistic categories and culture
Popular misconceptions about so-called “primitive” languages, e.g. mistaken
claims that “simple societies can’t have complex grammars”
▪ The traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Aboriginal people of Australia is
often mistakenly regarded as relatively simple. However, their culture is
thousands of years old and very complex, and their languages are amongst
the most interesting and grammatically complex that have been researched.
Every noun in Dyirbal belongs to one of the four classes. Whenever a
Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a sentence, the noun must be preceded by one
of the four classifiers: bayi, balan, balam or bala.

▪ The general patterns Dyirbal speakers seem to use to learn the system can be
summarised as follows:
I bayi: (human) males; some animals
II balan: (human) females, birds, water, fire, fighting
III balam: non-flesh food
IV bala: everything else
☞Particular types of experience, Dyirbal myths and cultural beliefs make a
contribution to class allocation.
▪ Kwakiutl, a Native American language, for example, requires a grammatical
classification of nouns based on whether they are visible or not.
 ▪ French requires every noun to be assigned to one of two genders or
grammatical categories.
▪ Kunwinjku has many more terms to label distinctions among kangaroos and
wallabies than English as kangaroos are an important part of Aboriginal
people’s environment. 🡪 Relate to Vietnam.
☞Rather than language determining what is perceived, it is the physical and
sociocultural environment which determines the distinctions that the language
develops.
▪ Tahitians use the same word for sadness and sickness. They believe that
sadness/sickness can be attributed to an attack by evil spirits.
▪ The word mate covers a continuum from sick to dead in Māori. Māori
culture does not make a sharp distinction between the living and the dead.
☞Language provides a means of encoding a community’s knowledge, beliefs and
values, i.e. its culture.

Maori kinship terminology

In Māori culture, relative age is very important.
The importance of the extended family or whānau as an important social unit is
also evident in the kinship system.
 ▪ The use of the same term whaea both for a child’s mother and for the
mother’s sisters.
▪ The term pāpā refers not only to a child’s father but also to his father’s
brothers
▪ The same pattern holds for terms used to refer to a child’s siblings and
cousins
☞Gender and relative age are semantically marked, but degree of kinship (as
viewed through Western eyes) is not lexically distinguished.
� Kinship labels indicate the mutual rights and obligations of different
members of the whānau towards each other. The lexical labels identify those
with similar social rights and obligations in relation to the speaker.
🡪Linguistic terminology here indexes important cultural relationships.
Kinship systems are encoded and the fineness of the distinctions and their
cultural significance differ dramatically from one culture to another.
▪ Njamal has distinct terms for younger vs. Older siblings and younger
cousins.
▪ There is a specific kinship term for every member of the tribe.
▪ Every Njamal person belongs to one of two distinct moieties (descent
groups) determined by your father.
▪ Shared moiety membership creates obligations to care for people when they
need it.
▪ You may only marry someone from the other moiety: You can marry your
father’s sister’s children (opposite moiety), but not your father’s brother’s
children (same moiety).
☞The lexical labels serve as indicators of the complex mutual social rights and
obligations of community members.

The cost of language loss

Ubykh:
▪ Some of these sounds are not known in any other language.
▪ The complex morphology of Ubykh allows one-word expressions such as
aqhjazbacr’aghawdœtwaaylafaq’ayt’madaqh which translates as “if only
you had not been able to make him take it all out from under me again for
them”
Hixkaryana, a Carib language:
▪ Word order: The object (O) at the beginning of the sentence and the
subject (S) at the end, with the verb (V) in between
☞Hixkaryana scuttled that theory and forced descriptive and theoretical
linguists to think again about linguistic possibilities, the range of formal
constraints on human cognition, and the kinds of linguistic rules that the human
brain can cope with as well as information on possible cognitive limitations on
human thinking.
In terms of the environment, when we lose a language which makes subtle
distinctions between plants on the basis of their medicinal properties, or which
encodes important biological and environmental knowledge which may not be
obvious to outsiders, we lose information which may be very difficult to
retrieve.
▪ A quarter of the prescriptive medicines used in the USA derive from
plants which grow in the world’s rainforests, and which are most easily
 identified in languages which are
at great risk of disappearing.
Language loss also entails the loss of insights about human perception.
▪ Tuyuca speakers through their grammar to indicate how much trust the
listener should put in the information being offered.
▪ Amazon and New Guinea Highlands speakers are required to specify the
source of their evidence in grammars.
▪ Ngalakan, an Australian Aboriginal language, has a special “compassion”
prefix which attaches to the verb to indicate the speaker’s sympathy for
someone in the event being described
Another important reason for deploring language loss is the fact that when people
lose their language, their distinctive sociocultural identity is also put at risk.

III. Discourse Patterns and Culture

"discourse patterns" - these are the ways people communicate within a particular
culture or social group. They're the unwritten rules that govern how we interact,
tell stories, ask questions, and express ourselves. These patterns are learned from a
young age and can vary significantly across different cultures. For example, in
some cultures, directness is valued, while in others, it's seen as rude, with
indirectness and saving face are prioritized.

Culture plays a huge role in shaping our communication styles. Cultural values,
beliefs, and norms influence everything from how direct or indirect we are, to our
body language, and how comfortable we are with silence. Power dynamics within
a culture also affect communication. For instance, think about how you speak to a
close friend versus your professor.

Case Study: Aboriginal Australian Communication

A powerful example of how culture influences discourse is seen in Aboriginal

Australian communication. Aboriginal English often emphasizes indirectness and
avoiding intrusion. This stems from a cultural value of respecting individual
privacy and maintaining harmonious relationships. To illustrate, let's look at the
case of Robyn Kina, an Aboriginal woman wrongly convicted of murder. She
remained silent when questioned directly by her lawyers about crucial details.
However, she later revealed this information to TV journalists who built close
relationship with her over time and used indirect questioning techniques,
respecting Aboriginal communication norms. This case highlights how cultural
differences in discourse patterns can have serious, even life-altering, bad
consequences, especially within the legal system.
IV. Language, Social Class & Cognition

1. Relationship between language and social class on cognition?

+ Emmie, a Scottish girl from a wealthy family, attended a boarding school in

southern England. Her Scottish accent made her speech difficult for teachers to
understand. It led them to perceive her as intellectually deficient.
+ In British society, it’s a common stereotype that working-class children
underperform in academics compared to middle-class children just because
they use a different variety of English than working-class children → as a result,
working-class children are expected to change the way they speak.
Liệu có phải việc mà working class children sử dụng different variety so với
middle-class ảnh hưởng đến cognitive của họ?
(CHANGE SLIDE)

2. Basil Bernstein’s perspective

+In 1960s, Basil Bernstein cũng đăt ra câu hỏi liệu có any potential cognitive
implications when groups use different varieties of the same language.
Ông cũng concern rằng: British children from working-class backgrounds were not
progressing well at school. It was also widely recognized that working-class
children spoke English differently from middle-class children.
(CHANGE SLIDE)
+ He attempted to account for the linguistic differences between social classes in
terms of his concept of codes. He suggested two types of codes: restricted and
elaborated codes.
● Restricted code: high in context-dependency, shorter sentences and fewer
descriptive elements.
● Elaborated code: relatively context-independent, more complex sentences,
detailed expressions. It aligns more closely with the formal language
expected in schools and professional environments.
→ The basic difference Bernstein can see between social classes is the range of
code they use: Working-class people tend to be confined to the restricted code,
while middle class can also use elaborated code.
(CHANGE SLIDE)

3. Early hypothesis on cognition

+ Researchers (mistakenly) assumed that the language working-class
children used in a formal interview with a middle-class adult was an
accurate representation of their sociolinguistic competence → These
interviews often resulted in monosyllabic or limited responses from
working-class children due to unfamiliar social settings, not a lack of
linguistic competence.
(CHANGE SLIDE)
+ Bernstein initially suggested that restricted codes limited cognitive abilities.
In other words, extending the principle of linguistic determinism, he argued
that the language that children use might influence what they can perceive
and even their ability to think.
→ But in fact, there is no research support whatsoever for such a claim

+ Revision of theory: Over time, Bernstein rejected the idea that language
inherently constrains cognition. He acknowledged that socialization patterns,
 not language itself, are responsible for differences in communication and
success.

4. Impact of early research

+ The early version had great appeal as a way of accounting for working-class
children’s lack of school success. → Instead of recognizing that schools
were failing to meet the educational needs of these children, researchers
placed the blame on the children and their language.

Conclusion:
Theory of Bernstein:
+ Benefits: led to a more detailed study of vernacular varieties and a clear
recognition of dialect differences that they are rather superficial aspects and
don’t affect cognitive ability.
+ His work received some criticism:
● Class system is maintained by codes differences bwt speakers
● overlook the importance of class conflict in linguistic differentiation.
● is based on a middle-class ideology
+ often misused: appear to label working-class children as linguistically and
cognitively deprived. And this obviously is not true. In fact, such language
variations have no serious intellectual consequences. These differences have
no meaningful impact on cognitive abilities or intellectual potential

REFERENCES
Dolphin1234tt. (n.d.). Discourse patterns. Scribd.

[Link]