I venture to say most working linguists would reject—outright—strong versions of linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and would regard neuro-linguistic programming as pseudoscientific rubbish. This is of course in contrast to the general public: even the highly-educated take linguistic relativity as an obvious description of human life. Yet, it is not uncommon for the same linguists to endorse beliefs in the power of renaming that is hard to reconcile with the general disrepute of the vulgar Whorfian view the power of renaming assumes.

For instance, George Lakoff’s work on “framing” in politics argued that renaming social programs was the one weird trick needed to get Howard Dean into the White House. While this seems quaint in retrospect, his proposal was widely debated at the time. Pinker’s (sigh) takedown is necessary reading. The problem, of course, is that Lakoff ought to have provided, and ought to have been expected to provide, any evidence at all for a view of language widely regarded as untutored by his colleagues.

The case of renaming languages is a grayer one. I believe that one ought to call people what they want to be called, and that if stakeholders would prefer their language to be referred to as Tohono Oʼodham rather than Pápago, I am and will remain happy to oblige.¹ If African American Vernacular English is renamed to African American Language (as seems to be increasing common in scholarship), I will gladly follow suit. But I can’t imagine how it could be the case that the renaming represents a reconceptualization of either the language itself, or a change in how we study it. Indeed, it would be strange for the name of any language to reflect any interesting property of said language. French by any other name would still have V-to-T movement and liaison.

It may be that these acts of renaming have power. Indeed, I hope they do. But I have to suspect the opposite: they’re the sort of fiddling one does when one is out power, when one is struggling to believe that a better world is possible. And if I’m wrong, who is better suited to show that than the trained linguist?

Endnotes

1. Supposedly, the older name of the language comes from a pejorative used by a neighboring tribe, the Pima. Ba꞉bawĭkoʼa means, roughly ‘tepary bean eater’. The Spanish colonizers adapted this as Pápago. I feel like the gloss sounds like a cutting insult in English too, so I get why this exonym has fallen in disrepute.