Languages show stronger shared meanings in culture than nature or motion
Where meanings converge and diverge: Revisiting linguistic relativity across 81 languages
Computation and Language
Summary
People who speak different languages organize ideas in distinct ways depending on the topic. The authors found that meanings related to culture and society are more similar across languages than those about nature or movement. Differences between languages increase when they come from far-apart places, especially for cultural ideas. This suggests that while some basic concepts may be universal, others change with language and local experience.
What this means in practice
- •For machine translation developers: Improve translation models by accounting for cultural concept similarities and differences across languages detected via embeddings.
- •For cross-cultural communication trainers: Design training programs that emphasize variable conceptual relations in culture versus nature to better prepare for intercultural interactions.
Authors
Weiran Wang, Wenjuan Qin, Haitao Liu
Abstract
Do people who speak different languages organize concepts in similar ways? This question lies at the heart of the Sapir--Whorf hypothesis and debates about linguistic relativity. Shared basic meanings, however, need not imply shared relations among them. We compared relations among 196 basic concepts across 81 languages, using word embeddings from two multilingual models to quantify conceptual structure expressed in language. Cross-language correspondence was greater for sociocultural meanings than for meanings concerning nature and motion, a contrast recurring across models and classifications. Within the sociocultural domain, relational differences increased with geographic separation; less closely related languages differed more across all domains. These findings suggest that universality and relativity are interwoven across conceptual domains. They inform an account in which shared cognitive resources interact with linguistic and local experience, and predict greater cross-language correspondence in human semantic judgments for sociocultural than for nature and motion meanings.