In a 1936 paper, the fire inspector and amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that because the Hopi language, spoken by the Native American tribe in Arizona, has no tense markers, the Hopi people only think in the present. They have “no notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum,” Whorf wrote, “in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future into a present and into a past.”

This isn’t true, as it turns out. The linguist Ekkehart Malotki demonstrated in a 1983 study that the Hopi make all sorts of temporal distinctions, even if they don’t do so with verb tenses. Still, the idea lives on, as does the idea that the Inuit perceive snow differently than non-Inuit because they have a multitude of words for snow. This, too, is bunk. The Inuit may have more words for snow than English does, as Laura Martin argued in 1986, but several words refer to a single phenomenon. In the end, the total number of ways of thinking about snow is not that different between Inuit and English speakers.

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Whorfianism, the idea that language determines thought, has had its ups and downs. It was all the rage in the 1950s, fell out of favor in the 1960s, and had something of a revival in the 1980s as postmodern theories of language came into vogue in the United States. It hasn’t fared so greatly since, largely because it has been difficult to find evidence to support it. It hasn’t helped, either, that it leads to the conclusion that if English, for example, determines the thoughts of English speakers, this idea could not be expressed in English.

In A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think, Caleb Everett tries to salvage a version of Whorfianism from the rubble. Everett, a professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, is the son of Daniel Everett, a major voice on the side of the linguistic relativists over the past 20 years. Everett states that he has no desire to revisit Whorf’s more “radical” claims about the Hopi language and acknowledges that linguists “have documented ways in which the Hopi language does in fact allow its speakers to refer to time.” Instead, he hopes to explore the many ways that language may “impact” or “shape” or “influence” or “potentially affect” the way people perceive the world.

That language has some effect on how we see the world is neither new nor controversial, and Everett provides many examples — some well known, some not — of how the way people speak about the world emphasizes certain aspects of reality. For example, Karitiâna, which is spoken by a tribe in Rondônia in Brazil, has more words to refer to siblings than in English. In Karitiâna, the word for sister is different if the speaker is a man or a woman (pat’in in the former and kypeet in the latter). If the sister is older than the female speaker, the word is different again: haj. The kinship terms in Karitiâna are “more symmetrical and reciprocal” than in English, Everett writes, and highlight the different kinds of relationship a brother might have with a sister than two sisters might have with each other. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to think about the relationship between brothers and sisters in a way like Karitiâna does.

Yet, while Everett never directly claims that language determines thought, he regularly suggests that it may have a much stronger impact than we think. He argues that for years, Western linguists focused almost exclusively on Western languages, which has obscured the radically different ways non-Western and nonindustrialized societies speak and think.

But linguists have been studying non-Western and nonindustrialized societies for well over 50 years, and many of Everett’s anecdotes are well over 20 years old. It is well known that Kuuk Thaayorre speakers use the sun in the sky as a metaphor for time rather than thinking of time in more “egocentric” terms like English speakers. Earlier events are thought of as happening in the east and older events in the west. The Yupno think of the future as “uphill” and the past “downhill.” For Everett, this is proof that the way we refer to time — that is, the metaphors we use to speak about time — “have nonsuperficial effects” on our “thought processes.” What those “nonsuperficial effects” are, however, and on which “thought processes,” he doesn’t say.

This happens again and again in the book. He argues by suggestion. He never defines what he means exactly by “thought” and regularly refers to what studies “may” show without acknowledging, of course, that they may also show nothing of the sort.

Strangely, toward the end of the book, Everett examines what he thinks are natural connections between the sounds of words and their meanings. Once again, based on a few examples, he suggests that words may not be as arbitrary as we think. Some words and sounds clearly connect to the things the words name. But this is hardly evidence that all language is nonarbitrary or even that the relationship between “meanings and sounds is much less arbitrary than we once thought,” as Everett writes. The fact that he acknowledges that “the bulk of spoken words do appear to be arbitrary in form” raises the question of why he makes so much of a few examples of potential nonarbitrariness.

Perhaps it is because he wants to reduce language to its environment. Everett seems to believe that there are no universals across human societies. Whatever universals people claim to observe are just the result of Western biases.

Is this right? Everett is surely correct that there is “extensive linguistic ... diversity” across human societies. But what about “extensive ... cognitive” ones, as he also claims? Probably not. John McWhorter showed convincingly in his 2014 book, The Language Hoax, that people think about the world in largely similar ways.

McWhorter concluded, in fact, that Whorfianism “is not scientific.” It is rooted, rather, in the belief that Western societies were not superior to so-called primitive ones. Everett clearly shares this belief and holds, as did Whorf, that acknowledging these differences leads to an increased respect for those societies. Alas, that is not always the case, as history shows.

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Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.