The problem with Whorfianism is ...

Consider a series of authors. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Faulkner and Hemingway, Auden, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Hardy. Frank O'Hara and Barbara Guest. Ezra Pound. Lorine Niedecker. Samuel Beckett. Add your own favorite or least favorite authors, all writing in "English." Now obviously you can attribute the difference in the relation between language and thought in all these writers to the fact that they are not writing in the same *English.* Differences in epoch, dialect, place and time will make them different enough from one another.

Yet they are similar to each other in the language they speak that any kind of lingistic determinism becomes improbable. Put another way, what we call *English* is flexible enough to accomodate worlds of difference.

Now when we look at other languages, since we don't know these languages as well, we tend to think of them as more homogenous, or reduce them to a cultural stereotype.

Take the difference between Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese of the Iberian peninsula. These differences are more "institutionalized" than those between Spanish American Spanish and Peninsular Spanish. That is, there is a clearer separation between the official norms of the language. (This may or may not correspond to more differentiation at the linguistic level. Since there is as much diversity within Spanish America, arguably, as between Spain and Spanish America, that question is quite complicated.) Would you want to attribute cultural differences between Brazil and Portugal to mostly linguistic causes? I would think not. These languages are more alike than they are to any other third language.

With a language spoken in a limited geographical region by a limited number of speakers, there is an easier identification between language and culture. After all, those are the only speakers that there are! But this seems a historical accident. If Irish were spoken on five continents by several culturallly diverse groups, then Irish would have as much cultural malleability as English does. It is not the syntactic structure of a language that makes people think in a certain way.