Towards Linguistic Relativity: Key Issues and Challenges

Linguistic relativity continues to be widely recognized as a vital issue in the study of language. This significance stems from the fact that the questions raised by linguistic relativity touch upon whether human beings can truly understand the world, and how they come to understand both the world and their relationship to it. Ultimately, this issue leads to the cortical neural mechanisms underlying speech and thought, and must eventually be subjected to verification by empirical evidence from neuroscience. It is therefore clearly not a pure linguistic issue that linguistic relativity and cognitive linguistics can resolve independently. Nevertheless, if research on linguistic relativity is to proceed in this more appropriate direction, it is possible to establish a clear scope of exposition of this hypothesis. By systematically identifying and separating those issues that may be used to challenge or potentially falsify the hypothesis independently of direct neuroscientific evidence, we can place linguistic relativity on a more secure theoretical footing as a hypothesis worthy of serious discussion and examination, while awaiting the neuroscientific data that may ultimately confirm or disconfirm it.