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Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1921 Edition.
174 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1921
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About the author
Edward Sapir
171 books40 followersEdward Sapir was born in Pomerania, Germany, in 1884, and came to the United States at the age of five. He first made his reputation as an expert on languages of the Native American. He taught at the University of Chicago and later at Yale, and was one of the first to explore the relations between language studies and anthropology. He died in 1939. Language, first published in 1921, is his only full-length book for a general audience. He published a great many articles and some verse in periodicals.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
June 21, 2012
I am watching John McWhorter’s Great Course on Linguistics, in which he recommends Sapir’s book as a general introduction to linguistics. After reading the book I thought that it was a good one to read before you start studying linguistics – it seems to cover a lot of the field, giving the reader a feel for the subject. But the books neglects to define some of the basic technical terms that a beginner needs, so that it also seems like a summary aimed at a scholar who has spent several years in the field.
The book is about 90 years old, so I don’t know how much has changed in the field since then, but McWhorter recommended it, so I suppose it must still be current.
Sapir’s erudition is colossal. He gives examples from languages from all over the world, and of many types. He really seems to know what he is talking about.
Something that I thought was amusing was Sapir’s discussion of the word “whom”. He spent several pages on it. He thought “whom” was on its way out of the English language, citing several tendencies in English that worked against it. Now, 90 years later, John McWhorter also sneers at the word. It is true that we often feel awkward with “whom”, and often aren’t quite sure when to use it or not, but it just seems to keep tottering on and on. I wonder why.
The book is about 90 years old, so I don’t know how much has changed in the field since then, but McWhorter recommended it, so I suppose it must still be current.
Sapir’s erudition is colossal. He gives examples from languages from all over the world, and of many types. He really seems to know what he is talking about.
Something that I thought was amusing was Sapir’s discussion of the word “whom”. He spent several pages on it. He thought “whom” was on its way out of the English language, citing several tendencies in English that worked against it. Now, 90 years later, John McWhorter also sneers at the word. It is true that we often feel awkward with “whom”, and often aren’t quite sure when to use it or not, but it just seems to keep tottering on and on. I wonder why.
November 13, 2024
4.5 stars. Very interesting survey of some fundamentals of linguistics (grammar, phonology, drift), especially as related to English specifically. I'm not a linguist and can't speak to how well this 1921 book holds up to modern linguistic theory, but it's highly readable and well structured.
There's an excellent ebook with working endnotes (this book contains many endnotes and all are worth reading) available for free on Project Gutenberg.
There's an excellent ebook with working endnotes (this book contains many endnotes and all are worth reading) available for free on Project Gutenberg.
November 11, 2025
This book, which remains one of the most foundational works in modern linguistics, was gifted to be by a friend in 2015. This book is an elegant, philosophical, and intensely humanistic exploration of language as both a cultural artifact and a psychological phenomenon.
Written in an era before structuralism and well before the Chomskyan revolution, Sapir’s prose still reads with remarkable freshness, combining anthropological insight with linguistic precision. His central argument—that language is not a mere tool for communication but an organic expression of the human mind—set the tone for much of twentieth-century linguistic thought and continues to shape discussions about linguistic relativity, cognition, and the intimate link between language and culture.
Sapir begins by positioning language as a defining feature of humanity, more fundamental than any other social institution. For him, language is not just a means of conveying thought; it is thought itself, given structure and sound. He writes that “language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”
That deceptively simple phrase encapsulates Sapir’s entire worldview—his refusal to reduce language to mere mechanics or instinct, his insistence on its symbolic and voluntary nature, and his sense of it as a creative, cultural act.
One of Sapir’s major contributions in this work is his classification of linguistic phenomena without succumbing to rigid formalism. He introduces distinctions between phonetic, grammatical, and lexical levels of structure, but he does so to reveal their interconnectedness rather than to isolate them. Language, for him, is a living organism—its parts function only within the total system of meaning that a culture provides. Long before the rise of systems theory or Saussurean structuralism in the English-speaking world, Sapir intuitively grasped the notion of language as a structured system of signs, where no single element holds meaning independently.
Sapir’s writing also demonstrates a remarkable balance between scientific rigor and literary grace. His discussions of phonetic variation, for example, are grounded in empirical observation—he explains how the same sound may serve different structural functions in different languages—but his style remains free of jargon.
His prose has the rhythm of a cultural essay rather than a technical treatise, and this accessibility made the book an instant classic among anthropologists, psychologists, and even general readers. Indeed, Sapir’s anthropological training under Franz Boas is evident in every chapter: his view of language as a mirror of culture, his emphasis on linguistic diversity, and his profound respect for the expressive potential of so-called “primitive” tongues.
A central theme in Language is Sapir’s assertion that all languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing the range of human experience. This idea directly challenged the Eurocentric and evolutionist biases of his time, when many scholars ranked languages along a supposed scale of development—from “primitive” to “civilized.” Sapir dismantled such hierarchies with both evidence and eloquence, showing that the apparent “simplicity” of some languages was often an illusion born of ignorance.
He points out that the polysynthetic structures of Native American languages, for instance, exhibit astonishing grammatical intricacy—morphological patterns that rival or surpass those of Latin or Greek in logical coherence. By defending the intellectual equality of all linguistic systems, Sapir helped lay the groundwork for the later principle of linguistic relativity, which his student Benjamin Lee Whorf would famously expand upon.
Another powerful dimension of Sapir’s argument lies in his exploration of the relationship between language and thought. Though the phrase “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis” was coined much later, its philosophical roots are found here. Sapir suggests that “human beings do not live in the objective world alone, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.” This does not mean that language rigidly determines thought, but rather that it shapes the habitual categories through which reality is perceived. A speaker of Hopi, he implies, might experience time differently from a speaker of English, not because of cultural superstition, but because their linguistic frameworks encode time in fundamentally different ways. This idea—that grammatical structures mould the contours of cognition—has inspired entire generations of linguistic anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers of mind.
The brilliance of Sapir’s text lies also in its refusal to be dogmatic. He does not force his observations into a grand, totalising theory of language. Instead, he keeps the discussion open-ended, recognising that the nature of linguistic creativity resists simple generalisation. This humility contrasts sharply with later linguistic models that sought universal formal systems (such as Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar).
Where Chomsky looked for competence, the idealised mental system underlying speech, Sapir sought to understand performance as a social and cultural act. He was less interested in language as an abstract code than in language as lived experience—the laughter, emotion, and identity carried by every utterance.
Yet Sapir’s scientific side was no less formidable. His discussions of sound change, morphological classification, and syntactic patterning foreshadowed the modern typological approach in linguistics. He identified isolating, agglutinative, inflectional, and polysynthetic types of grammatical structure—a taxonomy still used today in introductory linguistic textbooks.
What makes Sapir’s treatment superior to many later structuralist analyses is his sense of dynamism: he insists that these types are not fixed categories but tendencies within a continuum. Languages evolve, borrow, merge, and transform; there is no static perfection. “The ‘drift’ of language,” he writes, is as natural as the drift of continents—an organic process rather than a design.
An exclusively striking section of the book deals with the aesthetics of speech. Sapir argues that languages differ not only in logical or grammatical organisation but also in form-feeling—the intuitive sense of beauty and fitness that speakers unconsciously possess. Some languages may feel “angular,” others “flowing”; some “crisp”, others “melodic”.
This insight predates and anticipates developments in linguistic aesthetics and psycholinguistics. For Sapir, linguistic form is never arbitrary; it resonates with the cultural sensibility of its speakers. He famously writes that “the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation,” suggesting that style, rhythm, and metaphor are as much cultural as cognitive phenomena.
Throughout Language, Sapir’s interdisciplinary spirit shines. His range extends from phonetics and morphology to poetry, history, and philosophy. He quotes examples from English, French, Chinese, and Native American languages with equal ease. This polyglot command lends his analysis authority and scope, and his ability to derive general principles from diverse linguistic data marks him as one of the great synthesisers of human knowledge.
It is also significant that Language was published in 1921—a transitional period in intellectual history. The First World War had shaken faith in universal progress; the scientific optimism of the nineteenth century was giving way to a more relativistic worldview. Sapir’s book, in this context, offered a kind of humanist reconciliation between science and art. It argued that rigorous analysis of language need not destroy its mystery—that to study speech scientifically was also to honour the soul of culture. In this sense, Sapir occupies a rare position between the empiricism of the linguist and the imagination of the poet.
The influence of Language cannot be overstated. It became a touchstone for generations of linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Leonard Bloomfield, Roman Jakobson, and Benjamin Lee Whorf all acknowledged its impact. Even Chomsky’s later emphasis on the cognitive universality of grammar can be read as an extension—albeit in a different key—of Sapir’s idea that linguistic structure reflects human mental design. Outside academia, the book shaped literary modernists and cultural critics who were searching for new ways to understand identity, communication, and art.
Critics have occasionally pointed out that Sapir’s theoretical framework lacks the formal rigor that later linguistics demanded. There are no mathematical models or transformational rules here. But that is precisely its enduring power. The book reminds us that language is not reducible to algorithms; it is the living breath of humanity. In an age dominated by computational linguistics and AI-driven natural language processing, Sapir’s vision reads almost prophetic: he warns that reducing speech to a mechanical process risks erasing the emotional and cultural dimensions that make it meaningful.
Ultimately, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech is a work of synthesis, beauty, and foresight. It stands at the crossroads of science and art, describing language as both structure and spirit. Sapir’s prose is luminous with a kind of intellectual empathy—he listens to languages as one listens to music, attentive to tone, variation, and silence.
His achievement lies not only in what he explained but also in how he made readers feel the wonder of human speech anew.
Over a century later, Sapir’s insights continue to inspire scholars who view linguistics not as a sterile science of forms, but as an inquiry into what it means to be human.
Language is not merely a textbook; it is a meditation—a bridge between mind and world, sound and meaning, individual and community. In it, Sapir gave language its due dignity: as the most intimate mirror of civilisation and the most enduring artifact of the human spirit.
Written in an era before structuralism and well before the Chomskyan revolution, Sapir’s prose still reads with remarkable freshness, combining anthropological insight with linguistic precision. His central argument—that language is not a mere tool for communication but an organic expression of the human mind—set the tone for much of twentieth-century linguistic thought and continues to shape discussions about linguistic relativity, cognition, and the intimate link between language and culture.
Sapir begins by positioning language as a defining feature of humanity, more fundamental than any other social institution. For him, language is not just a means of conveying thought; it is thought itself, given structure and sound. He writes that “language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”
That deceptively simple phrase encapsulates Sapir’s entire worldview—his refusal to reduce language to mere mechanics or instinct, his insistence on its symbolic and voluntary nature, and his sense of it as a creative, cultural act.
One of Sapir’s major contributions in this work is his classification of linguistic phenomena without succumbing to rigid formalism. He introduces distinctions between phonetic, grammatical, and lexical levels of structure, but he does so to reveal their interconnectedness rather than to isolate them. Language, for him, is a living organism—its parts function only within the total system of meaning that a culture provides. Long before the rise of systems theory or Saussurean structuralism in the English-speaking world, Sapir intuitively grasped the notion of language as a structured system of signs, where no single element holds meaning independently.
Sapir’s writing also demonstrates a remarkable balance between scientific rigor and literary grace. His discussions of phonetic variation, for example, are grounded in empirical observation—he explains how the same sound may serve different structural functions in different languages—but his style remains free of jargon.
His prose has the rhythm of a cultural essay rather than a technical treatise, and this accessibility made the book an instant classic among anthropologists, psychologists, and even general readers. Indeed, Sapir’s anthropological training under Franz Boas is evident in every chapter: his view of language as a mirror of culture, his emphasis on linguistic diversity, and his profound respect for the expressive potential of so-called “primitive” tongues.
A central theme in Language is Sapir’s assertion that all languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing the range of human experience. This idea directly challenged the Eurocentric and evolutionist biases of his time, when many scholars ranked languages along a supposed scale of development—from “primitive” to “civilized.” Sapir dismantled such hierarchies with both evidence and eloquence, showing that the apparent “simplicity” of some languages was often an illusion born of ignorance.
He points out that the polysynthetic structures of Native American languages, for instance, exhibit astonishing grammatical intricacy—morphological patterns that rival or surpass those of Latin or Greek in logical coherence. By defending the intellectual equality of all linguistic systems, Sapir helped lay the groundwork for the later principle of linguistic relativity, which his student Benjamin Lee Whorf would famously expand upon.
Another powerful dimension of Sapir’s argument lies in his exploration of the relationship between language and thought. Though the phrase “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis” was coined much later, its philosophical roots are found here. Sapir suggests that “human beings do not live in the objective world alone, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.” This does not mean that language rigidly determines thought, but rather that it shapes the habitual categories through which reality is perceived. A speaker of Hopi, he implies, might experience time differently from a speaker of English, not because of cultural superstition, but because their linguistic frameworks encode time in fundamentally different ways. This idea—that grammatical structures mould the contours of cognition—has inspired entire generations of linguistic anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers of mind.
The brilliance of Sapir’s text lies also in its refusal to be dogmatic. He does not force his observations into a grand, totalising theory of language. Instead, he keeps the discussion open-ended, recognising that the nature of linguistic creativity resists simple generalisation. This humility contrasts sharply with later linguistic models that sought universal formal systems (such as Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar).
Where Chomsky looked for competence, the idealised mental system underlying speech, Sapir sought to understand performance as a social and cultural act. He was less interested in language as an abstract code than in language as lived experience—the laughter, emotion, and identity carried by every utterance.
Yet Sapir’s scientific side was no less formidable. His discussions of sound change, morphological classification, and syntactic patterning foreshadowed the modern typological approach in linguistics. He identified isolating, agglutinative, inflectional, and polysynthetic types of grammatical structure—a taxonomy still used today in introductory linguistic textbooks.
What makes Sapir’s treatment superior to many later structuralist analyses is his sense of dynamism: he insists that these types are not fixed categories but tendencies within a continuum. Languages evolve, borrow, merge, and transform; there is no static perfection. “The ‘drift’ of language,” he writes, is as natural as the drift of continents—an organic process rather than a design.
An exclusively striking section of the book deals with the aesthetics of speech. Sapir argues that languages differ not only in logical or grammatical organisation but also in form-feeling—the intuitive sense of beauty and fitness that speakers unconsciously possess. Some languages may feel “angular,” others “flowing”; some “crisp”, others “melodic”.
This insight predates and anticipates developments in linguistic aesthetics and psycholinguistics. For Sapir, linguistic form is never arbitrary; it resonates with the cultural sensibility of its speakers. He famously writes that “the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation,” suggesting that style, rhythm, and metaphor are as much cultural as cognitive phenomena.
Throughout Language, Sapir’s interdisciplinary spirit shines. His range extends from phonetics and morphology to poetry, history, and philosophy. He quotes examples from English, French, Chinese, and Native American languages with equal ease. This polyglot command lends his analysis authority and scope, and his ability to derive general principles from diverse linguistic data marks him as one of the great synthesisers of human knowledge.
It is also significant that Language was published in 1921—a transitional period in intellectual history. The First World War had shaken faith in universal progress; the scientific optimism of the nineteenth century was giving way to a more relativistic worldview. Sapir’s book, in this context, offered a kind of humanist reconciliation between science and art. It argued that rigorous analysis of language need not destroy its mystery—that to study speech scientifically was also to honour the soul of culture. In this sense, Sapir occupies a rare position between the empiricism of the linguist and the imagination of the poet.
The influence of Language cannot be overstated. It became a touchstone for generations of linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Leonard Bloomfield, Roman Jakobson, and Benjamin Lee Whorf all acknowledged its impact. Even Chomsky’s later emphasis on the cognitive universality of grammar can be read as an extension—albeit in a different key—of Sapir’s idea that linguistic structure reflects human mental design. Outside academia, the book shaped literary modernists and cultural critics who were searching for new ways to understand identity, communication, and art.
Critics have occasionally pointed out that Sapir’s theoretical framework lacks the formal rigor that later linguistics demanded. There are no mathematical models or transformational rules here. But that is precisely its enduring power. The book reminds us that language is not reducible to algorithms; it is the living breath of humanity. In an age dominated by computational linguistics and AI-driven natural language processing, Sapir’s vision reads almost prophetic: he warns that reducing speech to a mechanical process risks erasing the emotional and cultural dimensions that make it meaningful.
Ultimately, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech is a work of synthesis, beauty, and foresight. It stands at the crossroads of science and art, describing language as both structure and spirit. Sapir’s prose is luminous with a kind of intellectual empathy—he listens to languages as one listens to music, attentive to tone, variation, and silence.
His achievement lies not only in what he explained but also in how he made readers feel the wonder of human speech anew.
Over a century later, Sapir’s insights continue to inspire scholars who view linguistics not as a sterile science of forms, but as an inquiry into what it means to be human.
Language is not merely a textbook; it is a meditation—a bridge between mind and world, sound and meaning, individual and community. In it, Sapir gave language its due dignity: as the most intimate mirror of civilisation and the most enduring artifact of the human spirit.
September 19, 2012
I'd give it a higher rating, but the sections on phonetic law and its various classifications went over my head. However, the chapters that were more grounded in sociology and aesthetics were fantastic. Still, as a layman I found Sapir's writing very accessible despite the technical sections. I'm guessing some of this stuff is outdated, but it was definitely worth reading.
March 18, 2024
Edward Sapir. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. 1921.
Kilu von Prince, Ana Krajinović, and Manfred Krifka. “Irrealis is Real”. 2022.
When I was an undergrad studying anthropology back in the mid-1980’s, Sapir’s Language was one of the first books that really spoke to me. It seemed to embody what anthropology was all about. While most of today’s mainstream linguists have taken to criticizing or ignoring Sapir’s methods and discoveries of a century ago (for example, see Steven Pinker’s extended diatribe against Sapir in The Language Instinct), Sapir for me still occupies a special place in the canons of both linguistics and anthropology. In 1921, Sapir thought of the young discipline of linguistics as a real science, yet many of the metaphors and images he uses to characterize LANGUAGE in the abstract appear to be anything but scientific. But I maintain that Sapir is nevertheless consistent in his approach to language. If he flexes his poetic muscles at times, it is to show how language gives its speakers the power to stretch the limits of their understanding, allowing them to say what has never before been said, and to mean it.
Some of Sapir’s metaphors about language bear repeating. One group of metaphors link together thought and language:
“...thought is nothing but language denuded of its outward garb.”
“...language, as a structure, is on its inner face the mold of thought.”
“...speech would seem to be the only road we know of that leads to [thought].”
“...the word, as we know, is not only a key; it may also be a fetter.”
“Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is the particular how of thought.”
Another group of metaphors depicts language as a work of art:
“Single Algonquin words are like tiny imagist poems.”
“Every language is itself a collective art of expression.”
“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”
“Language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze or clay are the materials of the sculptor.”
These images I hope demonstrate that Sapir practiced what he set out to preach. In contradistinction to Chomskyite formal methods and mathematical modeling, Sapir’s tropes give free reign to the power of words to say what has not been said before and to express what possibly cannot be expressed otherwise. From the point of view of Chomsky's Universal Grammar (sub specie aeternatis, as Spinoza might say), Sapir’s linguistic typology does violence to the routine generativist assumption that all languages are underlyingly identical in structure. For Chomsky, and for all other linguists who know not much about languages besides English, language is not a work of art, nor is it the garb of thought. It is the computational system of human cognition, bridging universal and innate ideas to various means of articulating those ideas. But then again, metaphor is at work here, too.
Sapir did not conjure his typological and historicist approach to linguistics out of whole cloth. Rather, he derived many of his ideas about language from German philologists like Wilhelm von Humboldt. But unlike Humboldt, Sapir knew that factors like race, national temperament, or even level of cultural complexity can in no way be tied to the ‘genius’ of a given tongue. Sapir gives the example of English as spoken by African Americans:
“The English language is not spoken by a unified race. In the United States, there are several millions of Negroes who know no other language. It is their mother-tongue, the formal vesture of their inmost thoughts and sentiments. It is as much their property, as inalienably ‘theirs,’ as the King of England’s.”
Unlike Chomsky, and along with Humboldt this time, Sapir divides speech into two key aspects: language as creative activity (energeia, or language as the ‘key’) and language constrained by the habituated sediment of past expression (ergon, or language as the ‘fetter’). Speakers in pursuit of meaning can at times take an active role in fabricating their language, for “language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.” But the historical context of our language inevitably plays a role in delimiting our speech as well, channeling our thoughts into the cognitive ruts left behind by all that has been said before by speakers of our language.
The fact that each language is unique does not contradict Sapir’s creed that all languages are equivalent, that is, that they are all equally valid. Whereas no language is perfect, all languages are in fact “fully developed”, even though they reflect “an almost incredible diversity.” All languages moreover demonstrate “a certain randomness of association,” which means that our semantic categories may lump together certain ideas while splitting other ideas apart. (Some facile examples from the simpler domain of vocabulary: Unlike English, Chinese makes a lexical distinction between rice as plant (mi) and rice as food (fan). English meanwhile distinguishes goats from sheep, while in Chinese they are both called yang.) There is a tension between our need at times to break grammatical rules and the ordinary obligation to follow those rules, and the apparent imperfections of grammatical systems seem to arise from this tension. Grammars then are not innate but are in fact nearly always a work in progress. As such, grammatical systems are forever incomplete: “Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.”
If there is one sub-field of linguistics that still finds favor with Sapir’s methods and insights it would have to be typology. Sapir’s own very dated typological system, presented in the “Grammatical Form” chapters of Language, is not really all that useful to the modern student. Despite its name, typology these days is not about typing languages into neat pigeon holes in order to make a final classification of all languages. Instead, typologists seek to discover a useful metalanguage by an extensive inventorying of grammatical categories, categories which are found in some languages and not in others. Empirically, this is what makes an honest comparison of grammars possible. Unlike generativists, typologists do not regard the seemingly endless variety of grammatical systems as a source of consternation or embarrassment. While followers of Saint Noam may be convinced that the empirical diversity of grammars will one day very soon be reduced to rigorous order and timeless uniformity, typologists willingly embrace that same empirical diversity, keeping their minds open to the astonishingly different ways in which grammars can be said to vary. As Sapir put it:
“...if we take our examples freely from the vast storehouse of language, from languages that are exotic as well as those that we are more familiar with, we shall find that there is hardly a possibility that is not realized in actual usage.”
A century after Sapir’s Language appeared, many linguists of a typological persuasion are still dredging up to the surface the kind of grammatical categories which are prominent in some languages but which are absent from others. One such recent study, “Irrealis is Real” by von Prince, Krajinović, and Krifka, looks at the categorical contrast of realis and irrealis. As the article points out, Sapir had already described an irrealis suffix in his 1930 grammar of Southern Paiute: “This element indicates that the activity expressed by the verb is unreal, i.e. either merely potential or contrary to fact (potential in past time)” (Sapir: “Southern Paiute, a Shoshone Language”). In many of the Oceanic languages of the South Pacific, there is this same obligatory grammatical distinction, part of the tense-aspect-mood system of their verb paradigms, by which speakers categorize all events as either actual or else as non-actual. So irrealis, marking the non-actual, is used to indicate future events, hypothetical possibilities, or counterfactual scenarios. All languages can make these kinds of semantic distinctions, but languages with irrealis have grammaticalized a complex idea onto a single morpheme for indicating a modal and often temporal contrast between the actual and the non-actual.
The authors of “Irrealis is Real” identified in their typological studies of Oceanic semantics some of the typical uses of irrealis verb markings: “irrealis markers are used for talking about future and counterfactual events. They are used in future and counterfactual conditionals, in complement clauses of verbs expressing wishes and intentions, in purpose clauses, and in expressions of ability and obligation.” It might be best to think of irrealis in model theoretic terms; irrealis serves to indicate a possible scenario (possible world) which the speaker judges to be incongruous with what we know with certainty to be the truth of the actual scenario, either because something hasn’t yet happened or else because some event is merely desired or speculated upon. In many European languages, the subjunctive mood plays a somewhat similar role to irrealis in being frequently merged with future tense, in bearing a hypothetical/wish connotation, and also by being used in subordinate clauses. Taking a typological approach to grammar, we can make use of ‘exotic’ languages in order to see more familiar languages in a new light.
But typologically speaking, the important thing to remember about irrealis as a unified semantic category is precisely the fact that this form of grammatical contrast is not universal. Rather, reallis/irrealis appears to be localized to some languages in certain places, like the South Pacific. In a sense, irrealis is like other grammatical categories which appear in some languages but not in most—for example, definiteness (many languages do not have articles) and tone (you oftentimes find tone languages in Bantu Africa and East Asia, but not much elsewhere).
It is perhaps fitting to end this review of Sapir’s Language by asserting once again that most rationalist assumptions of formal uniformity in all grammars are reductionist. What’s preferable is an empirical method that shows we are all human, not because we all think the exact same thoughts, but because humans at different times and in different places had arrived at the same solution for understanding reality (and in this case, irreality). Having merged under a single cognition ideas that most languages keep distinct, the South Seas islander and the Paiute Native American came to share a grammatical category of irrealis--despite being separated by 8,000 miles of ocean, desert, and the Grand Canyon. I find this patterning of variation to be interesting, but not altogether surprising. And I find it somehow reassuring that all languages are in fact potentially the same in their choice of semantically restrictive categories. But that potential does not imply that two languages separated by time and distance must somehow be cognitively identical. As any good anthropological linguist would say, ‘Vive la différence!’
Sapir’s Language is in the public domain. You can get it in lots of places, including gutenberg.org. “Irrealis is Real” was published in the journal Language vol 98:2. Paul Friedrich’s book The Language Parallax reflects on the poetic spirit of both Sapir and of Native American speakers. Rhetoric and Grammar, my master’s thesis at Rice, was written in part about Sapir’s rhetorical and grammatical contributions to linguistics and the other human sciences. A good recent reference for typology can be found in Payne’s Describing Morphosyntax and in Mithun's Languages of Native North America.
Kilu von Prince, Ana Krajinović, and Manfred Krifka. “Irrealis is Real”. 2022.
When I was an undergrad studying anthropology back in the mid-1980’s, Sapir’s Language was one of the first books that really spoke to me. It seemed to embody what anthropology was all about. While most of today’s mainstream linguists have taken to criticizing or ignoring Sapir’s methods and discoveries of a century ago (for example, see Steven Pinker’s extended diatribe against Sapir in The Language Instinct), Sapir for me still occupies a special place in the canons of both linguistics and anthropology. In 1921, Sapir thought of the young discipline of linguistics as a real science, yet many of the metaphors and images he uses to characterize LANGUAGE in the abstract appear to be anything but scientific. But I maintain that Sapir is nevertheless consistent in his approach to language. If he flexes his poetic muscles at times, it is to show how language gives its speakers the power to stretch the limits of their understanding, allowing them to say what has never before been said, and to mean it.
Some of Sapir’s metaphors about language bear repeating. One group of metaphors link together thought and language:
“...thought is nothing but language denuded of its outward garb.”
“...language, as a structure, is on its inner face the mold of thought.”
“...speech would seem to be the only road we know of that leads to [thought].”
“...the word, as we know, is not only a key; it may also be a fetter.”
“Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is the particular how of thought.”
Another group of metaphors depicts language as a work of art:
“Single Algonquin words are like tiny imagist poems.”
“Every language is itself a collective art of expression.”
“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”
“Language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze or clay are the materials of the sculptor.”
These images I hope demonstrate that Sapir practiced what he set out to preach. In contradistinction to Chomskyite formal methods and mathematical modeling, Sapir’s tropes give free reign to the power of words to say what has not been said before and to express what possibly cannot be expressed otherwise. From the point of view of Chomsky's Universal Grammar (sub specie aeternatis, as Spinoza might say), Sapir’s linguistic typology does violence to the routine generativist assumption that all languages are underlyingly identical in structure. For Chomsky, and for all other linguists who know not much about languages besides English, language is not a work of art, nor is it the garb of thought. It is the computational system of human cognition, bridging universal and innate ideas to various means of articulating those ideas. But then again, metaphor is at work here, too.
Sapir did not conjure his typological and historicist approach to linguistics out of whole cloth. Rather, he derived many of his ideas about language from German philologists like Wilhelm von Humboldt. But unlike Humboldt, Sapir knew that factors like race, national temperament, or even level of cultural complexity can in no way be tied to the ‘genius’ of a given tongue. Sapir gives the example of English as spoken by African Americans:
“The English language is not spoken by a unified race. In the United States, there are several millions of Negroes who know no other language. It is their mother-tongue, the formal vesture of their inmost thoughts and sentiments. It is as much their property, as inalienably ‘theirs,’ as the King of England’s.”
Unlike Chomsky, and along with Humboldt this time, Sapir divides speech into two key aspects: language as creative activity (energeia, or language as the ‘key’) and language constrained by the habituated sediment of past expression (ergon, or language as the ‘fetter’). Speakers in pursuit of meaning can at times take an active role in fabricating their language, for “language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.” But the historical context of our language inevitably plays a role in delimiting our speech as well, channeling our thoughts into the cognitive ruts left behind by all that has been said before by speakers of our language.
The fact that each language is unique does not contradict Sapir’s creed that all languages are equivalent, that is, that they are all equally valid. Whereas no language is perfect, all languages are in fact “fully developed”, even though they reflect “an almost incredible diversity.” All languages moreover demonstrate “a certain randomness of association,” which means that our semantic categories may lump together certain ideas while splitting other ideas apart. (Some facile examples from the simpler domain of vocabulary: Unlike English, Chinese makes a lexical distinction between rice as plant (mi) and rice as food (fan). English meanwhile distinguishes goats from sheep, while in Chinese they are both called yang.) There is a tension between our need at times to break grammatical rules and the ordinary obligation to follow those rules, and the apparent imperfections of grammatical systems seem to arise from this tension. Grammars then are not innate but are in fact nearly always a work in progress. As such, grammatical systems are forever incomplete: “Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.”
If there is one sub-field of linguistics that still finds favor with Sapir’s methods and insights it would have to be typology. Sapir’s own very dated typological system, presented in the “Grammatical Form” chapters of Language, is not really all that useful to the modern student. Despite its name, typology these days is not about typing languages into neat pigeon holes in order to make a final classification of all languages. Instead, typologists seek to discover a useful metalanguage by an extensive inventorying of grammatical categories, categories which are found in some languages and not in others. Empirically, this is what makes an honest comparison of grammars possible. Unlike generativists, typologists do not regard the seemingly endless variety of grammatical systems as a source of consternation or embarrassment. While followers of Saint Noam may be convinced that the empirical diversity of grammars will one day very soon be reduced to rigorous order and timeless uniformity, typologists willingly embrace that same empirical diversity, keeping their minds open to the astonishingly different ways in which grammars can be said to vary. As Sapir put it:
“...if we take our examples freely from the vast storehouse of language, from languages that are exotic as well as those that we are more familiar with, we shall find that there is hardly a possibility that is not realized in actual usage.”
A century after Sapir’s Language appeared, many linguists of a typological persuasion are still dredging up to the surface the kind of grammatical categories which are prominent in some languages but which are absent from others. One such recent study, “Irrealis is Real” by von Prince, Krajinović, and Krifka, looks at the categorical contrast of realis and irrealis. As the article points out, Sapir had already described an irrealis suffix in his 1930 grammar of Southern Paiute: “This element indicates that the activity expressed by the verb is unreal, i.e. either merely potential or contrary to fact (potential in past time)” (Sapir: “Southern Paiute, a Shoshone Language”). In many of the Oceanic languages of the South Pacific, there is this same obligatory grammatical distinction, part of the tense-aspect-mood system of their verb paradigms, by which speakers categorize all events as either actual or else as non-actual. So irrealis, marking the non-actual, is used to indicate future events, hypothetical possibilities, or counterfactual scenarios. All languages can make these kinds of semantic distinctions, but languages with irrealis have grammaticalized a complex idea onto a single morpheme for indicating a modal and often temporal contrast between the actual and the non-actual.
The authors of “Irrealis is Real” identified in their typological studies of Oceanic semantics some of the typical uses of irrealis verb markings: “irrealis markers are used for talking about future and counterfactual events. They are used in future and counterfactual conditionals, in complement clauses of verbs expressing wishes and intentions, in purpose clauses, and in expressions of ability and obligation.” It might be best to think of irrealis in model theoretic terms; irrealis serves to indicate a possible scenario (possible world) which the speaker judges to be incongruous with what we know with certainty to be the truth of the actual scenario, either because something hasn’t yet happened or else because some event is merely desired or speculated upon. In many European languages, the subjunctive mood plays a somewhat similar role to irrealis in being frequently merged with future tense, in bearing a hypothetical/wish connotation, and also by being used in subordinate clauses. Taking a typological approach to grammar, we can make use of ‘exotic’ languages in order to see more familiar languages in a new light.
But typologically speaking, the important thing to remember about irrealis as a unified semantic category is precisely the fact that this form of grammatical contrast is not universal. Rather, reallis/irrealis appears to be localized to some languages in certain places, like the South Pacific. In a sense, irrealis is like other grammatical categories which appear in some languages but not in most—for example, definiteness (many languages do not have articles) and tone (you oftentimes find tone languages in Bantu Africa and East Asia, but not much elsewhere).
It is perhaps fitting to end this review of Sapir’s Language by asserting once again that most rationalist assumptions of formal uniformity in all grammars are reductionist. What’s preferable is an empirical method that shows we are all human, not because we all think the exact same thoughts, but because humans at different times and in different places had arrived at the same solution for understanding reality (and in this case, irreality). Having merged under a single cognition ideas that most languages keep distinct, the South Seas islander and the Paiute Native American came to share a grammatical category of irrealis--despite being separated by 8,000 miles of ocean, desert, and the Grand Canyon. I find this patterning of variation to be interesting, but not altogether surprising. And I find it somehow reassuring that all languages are in fact potentially the same in their choice of semantically restrictive categories. But that potential does not imply that two languages separated by time and distance must somehow be cognitively identical. As any good anthropological linguist would say, ‘Vive la différence!’
Sapir’s Language is in the public domain. You can get it in lots of places, including gutenberg.org. “Irrealis is Real” was published in the journal Language vol 98:2. Paul Friedrich’s book The Language Parallax reflects on the poetic spirit of both Sapir and of Native American speakers. Rhetoric and Grammar, my master’s thesis at Rice, was written in part about Sapir’s rhetorical and grammatical contributions to linguistics and the other human sciences. A good recent reference for typology can be found in Payne’s Describing Morphosyntax and in Mithun's Languages of Native North America.
March 18, 2024
I said in my previous review of Lévi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning that I was going to read five secondary works on Structuralism next; I had hardly begun reading the introduction to the first book before I realized that I needed to read a few other books on structural linguistics, philosophy, psychology and literary theory first, as background. By a few, I mean about twenty. This is the kind of regress that keeps me from ever getting through my planned reading lists. To be sure, most of them were already on my extended TBR list; some, like Derrida and Lacan, were authors I have deliberately procrastinated on reading, others like Sapir were authors I actually wanted to read.
Sapir was one of the early pioneers of structural linguistics; Language, published in 1921, is one step beyond de Saussure, the founder, whom I read a few years ago, but well before my college linguistics textbook from the late sixties. Naturally, being just over a hundred years old, it is in some respects outdated, especially in the more technical parts, but the linguistic scientists who have superseded him all built on his foundations; that's how science works. For the most part, however, the book is fairly non-technical and is still a good general introduction to language for the general reader, and of course a must-read for any student of linguistics who is interested in the historical development of the discipline.
Sapir disclaims any attempt at dealing with the neurological bases of language; he goes a bit too far when he says that language merely uses abilities developed for other purposes in the same way as we use our brains to do math or our fingers for playing the piano — we certainly know today that areas of the brain as well as the vocal apparatus have evolved specifically to use language. However, what he was getting at is that languages need to be studied as abstract structures, which is true. In his discussion of phonetics (chapter 3), he approaches the idea of the phoneme, without using the term or defining it as clearly as contemporary linguistics books do. His discussion of the basic processes and concepts of grammar and how they are implemented in such diverse ways by different languages (chapters 4 and 5) is the heart of the book. The chapter on types of languages (chapter 6) is the most difficult, because he is trying to work out a new basis of classifying languages; the general reader may want to skip or skim through this section, although I found his discussion of agglutination vs. fusion very interesting.
Chapters 7 through 9 deal with diachronic linguistics (language change) and are the best thing I have ever read on the general principles involved, even though much has been learned since in detail. His example of the (lingering) disappearance of the "who"/"whom" distinction in English, and his other examples of the direction in which English is changing (e.g., "It's me" vs. "It is I") are very insightful and written in a lively, almost humorous style, and the history of the language over the last century has borne out many of his predictions. One phenomenon he did not predict, of course, was the contemporary usage of "they" and "their" as gender-indeterminate singulars in sentences such as "If someone has a toothache, they should see their dentist" — okay, I'm not great at thinking up examples — which I do not think is just an "incorrect" failure of agreement between singular antecedent and plural consequent as prescriptive English teachers claim, but an actual use of a former plural as a singular, completely analagous to the sixteenth-century use of the formerly plural "you" and "your" in place of the singular "thou", "thee" and "thy". Nevertheless, I think it fits well into his overall argument.
The blurb on the back of my edition (a Dover reprint) mentions the controversial "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", which claimed that at least some concepts are so tied to specific languages that they cannot be understood by speakers of other languages. There is nothing resembling this in the current book; he and Whorf developed that idea later, and in fact Sapir seems to say just the opposite in discussing the relationship of language to culture in chapter 10: "Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related. Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. it is difficult to see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience . . . and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience." The final chapter does however make the much less questionable point that the structure of a particular language (e.g., whether it has a fixed word order or a more variable one, whether it has inflectional endings, whether it can freely form compounds, etc.) may determine what sort of literary styles can be successfully developed in that language.
Sapir was one of the early pioneers of structural linguistics; Language, published in 1921, is one step beyond de Saussure, the founder, whom I read a few years ago, but well before my college linguistics textbook from the late sixties. Naturally, being just over a hundred years old, it is in some respects outdated, especially in the more technical parts, but the linguistic scientists who have superseded him all built on his foundations; that's how science works. For the most part, however, the book is fairly non-technical and is still a good general introduction to language for the general reader, and of course a must-read for any student of linguistics who is interested in the historical development of the discipline.
Sapir disclaims any attempt at dealing with the neurological bases of language; he goes a bit too far when he says that language merely uses abilities developed for other purposes in the same way as we use our brains to do math or our fingers for playing the piano — we certainly know today that areas of the brain as well as the vocal apparatus have evolved specifically to use language. However, what he was getting at is that languages need to be studied as abstract structures, which is true. In his discussion of phonetics (chapter 3), he approaches the idea of the phoneme, without using the term or defining it as clearly as contemporary linguistics books do. His discussion of the basic processes and concepts of grammar and how they are implemented in such diverse ways by different languages (chapters 4 and 5) is the heart of the book. The chapter on types of languages (chapter 6) is the most difficult, because he is trying to work out a new basis of classifying languages; the general reader may want to skip or skim through this section, although I found his discussion of agglutination vs. fusion very interesting.
Chapters 7 through 9 deal with diachronic linguistics (language change) and are the best thing I have ever read on the general principles involved, even though much has been learned since in detail. His example of the (lingering) disappearance of the "who"/"whom" distinction in English, and his other examples of the direction in which English is changing (e.g., "It's me" vs. "It is I") are very insightful and written in a lively, almost humorous style, and the history of the language over the last century has borne out many of his predictions. One phenomenon he did not predict, of course, was the contemporary usage of "they" and "their" as gender-indeterminate singulars in sentences such as "If someone has a toothache, they should see their dentist" — okay, I'm not great at thinking up examples — which I do not think is just an "incorrect" failure of agreement between singular antecedent and plural consequent as prescriptive English teachers claim, but an actual use of a former plural as a singular, completely analagous to the sixteenth-century use of the formerly plural "you" and "your" in place of the singular "thou", "thee" and "thy". Nevertheless, I think it fits well into his overall argument.
The blurb on the back of my edition (a Dover reprint) mentions the controversial "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", which claimed that at least some concepts are so tied to specific languages that they cannot be understood by speakers of other languages. There is nothing resembling this in the current book; he and Whorf developed that idea later, and in fact Sapir seems to say just the opposite in discussing the relationship of language to culture in chapter 10: "Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related. Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. it is difficult to see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience . . . and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience." The final chapter does however make the much less questionable point that the structure of a particular language (e.g., whether it has a fixed word order or a more variable one, whether it has inflectional endings, whether it can freely form compounds, etc.) may determine what sort of literary styles can be successfully developed in that language.
April 8, 2019
Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech by Edward Sapir.
I read this book years ago and just recently picked it up again and began to read it again. It really is a classic in the field of linguistics - the scientific study of language. Written almost a hundred years ago it still rings true and remains relevant to contemporary approaches to language. This is more than one can say of Chomsky's claims for a language faculty or a universal grammar back in the 70's. I guess the best we can say of that wild goose chase was that it was a good try but failed to provide any evidence to support its claims. Even the claim that recursion exists in every language has come under criticism.
Sapir begins by comparing talking to walking and concludes that whereas we are bound to stand up and begin to walk the same is not true of speech which depends upon the circumstance of being born into a society. He writes how language 'varies without assignable limits' and how it is 'a purely historical heritage' 'the product of long-continued social usage'.
In the same first chapter, he goes on to compare language to thought. No mean feat in itself, he deals first with the localisation of language in certain areas of the brain separating its electro-neurological activity from language on the grounds that it has not yet assumed a 'meaning'. With superb clarity, he concludes by citing meaning as the hallmark that identifies the linguistic experience.
All of which makes me wonder why so many - Chomskyites, Pinker, Fodor etc - find the diversity exhibited by 5,000-odd languages so unpalatable? The objective of science is to describe laws that explain the various states of all phenomena. Language appears to be one that has eluded that definitive form of description.
As an offshoot of human consciousness, is it any surprise that language slips through the net of science? It seems to me that the problem we face today and ever more so in the future is how technological developments will use language for deception - to influence elections, referenda, opinion, minds - until it can no longer be trusted and someone will write: In the end, the Word was Bad.
I read this book years ago and just recently picked it up again and began to read it again. It really is a classic in the field of linguistics - the scientific study of language. Written almost a hundred years ago it still rings true and remains relevant to contemporary approaches to language. This is more than one can say of Chomsky's claims for a language faculty or a universal grammar back in the 70's. I guess the best we can say of that wild goose chase was that it was a good try but failed to provide any evidence to support its claims. Even the claim that recursion exists in every language has come under criticism.
Sapir begins by comparing talking to walking and concludes that whereas we are bound to stand up and begin to walk the same is not true of speech which depends upon the circumstance of being born into a society. He writes how language 'varies without assignable limits' and how it is 'a purely historical heritage' 'the product of long-continued social usage'.
In the same first chapter, he goes on to compare language to thought. No mean feat in itself, he deals first with the localisation of language in certain areas of the brain separating its electro-neurological activity from language on the grounds that it has not yet assumed a 'meaning'. With superb clarity, he concludes by citing meaning as the hallmark that identifies the linguistic experience.
All of which makes me wonder why so many - Chomskyites, Pinker, Fodor etc - find the diversity exhibited by 5,000-odd languages so unpalatable? The objective of science is to describe laws that explain the various states of all phenomena. Language appears to be one that has eluded that definitive form of description.
As an offshoot of human consciousness, is it any surprise that language slips through the net of science? It seems to me that the problem we face today and ever more so in the future is how technological developments will use language for deception - to influence elections, referenda, opinion, minds - until it can no longer be trusted and someone will write: In the end, the Word was Bad.
June 27, 2021
This book is a fantastic introduction to the complexities of human language and gives a good overview of the various categories of study that linguistics has been divided into (e.g., phonetics and morphology). Sapir's particular attention to the framework and intrinsic "genius" of each language helped me appreciate how distinct and different languages could be and temporarily escape the simple English-language mindset that I typically approach the topic with.
All of that said, if an "introduction" was indeed Sapir's goal, he was a bit off the mark. Some of the material is quite dense and presupposes a basic understanding of linguistics that the book itself purports to offer. It would probably need to be twice as long to provide that basic context and still reach as deep as it does into the material.
All of that said, if an "introduction" was indeed Sapir's goal, he was a bit off the mark. Some of the material is quite dense and presupposes a basic understanding of linguistics that the book itself purports to offer. It would probably need to be twice as long to provide that basic context and still reach as deep as it does into the material.
November 3, 2024
Tiene dos Capitulos en medio que son muy cansinos porque son muy insistentes para probar un punto. Pero pues, era 1920, no podemos pedir mucho.
Pero en general, es un libro casi obligatorio para cualquiera interesado en lenguaje y filosofía.
Pero en general, es un libro casi obligatorio para cualquiera interesado en lenguaje y filosofía.
May 6, 2017
Read Lenguaje, Raza y Cultura.
May 10, 2021
Dated, and while full of wild claims (that nevertheless were not so wild at the time of writing), I would consider this essential reading.
May 14, 2021
This book is a well said for amyone beginning a linguistic view for the shelf life
August 21, 2021
Although some of the more technical aspects of this book flew miles above my head, it was an incredibly worthwhile and interesting book.
February 2, 2022
Un tema extremadamente interesante explicado de la manera más aburrida posible
March 25, 2024
1. Ejemplos confusos y no pertinentes.
2. Léxico muy rebuscado y poco claro.
3. Secuencia de los hechos rebuscada y difícil de seguir.
2. Léxico muy rebuscado y poco claro.
3. Secuencia de los hechos rebuscada y difícil de seguir.
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May 10, 2024
November 25, 2016
It is rather easy to dismiss what E. Sapir started in the study of linguistics if we only understand this science in the aftermath of L. Bloomfield or N. Chomsky; however, Sapir's proposal for a new perspective on grammatical processes underlies every single typological and morpho–syntactical theory nowadays.
May 16, 2009
Deserves a lot of respect for being one of the pioneering works in the field of linguistics, but all the information it contains is available in much more readable works that have been published since. For linguistics majors only.
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October 15, 2013I'm not giving this book a rating because I'm in no way qualified to judge it. It is a very technical book that will appeal to people who like to look at structures and formulas and find that a helpful way to look at the world. For me it was utterly exhausting, and I gave up fairly quickly.
December 31, 2015
This book may have been very good for what it is, but I had a lot of trouble getting through even the first chapter and ultimately didn't finish it. This book isn't really a "read for pleasure" type of book, or at least, it wasn't to me.
December 12, 2016
This was a good book but not a great one. While the word is that this is a good primer to linguistics, I found it to be cumbersome where it most needed clarity. It was mercifully playful in some areas, though, reflecting on language as art.
December 30, 2010
A fantastic short, deep plunge into the nature of language and speech. A wonderful intro to the field of linguistics.
May 31, 2012
Obviamente, en español.
July 6, 2012
I not only read this book but also revised the translation. Its revision has a long history. It was my prof who translated it and asked me to revise it.
September 12, 2016
It's historically interesting and surprisingly modern.
July 19, 2009
This is the must read introduction to linguistics
March 27, 2014
Still my favourite introduction to linguistics.
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