Hopi language

Hopi language, a North American Indian language of the Uto-Aztecan family, spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona. Hopi is of particular interest because of the way in which concepts of time and space are expressed in it: in its verb forms, for example, an event at a great distance from the speaker is characterized as having occurred in the distant past; the shorter the spatial distance, the less the temporal distance is seen to be. Hopi verbs have no real tense but instead are distinguished by aspect (the length of time an event lasts), validity (whether an action is completed or ongoing, expected, or regular and predictable), and clause-linkage (giving the temporal relationship of two or more verbs). In addition, verbs can be inflected to show that an action occurs in repeated segments: e.g., ríya (“it makes a quick spin”) and riyáyata (“it is spinning”).

In the 1930s the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf seized on these characteristics of the verbs of the Hopi language to illustrate the “Whorfian hypothesis”: language closely governs our experience of reality. The Hopi language frames the way in which the Hopi talk about their universe. The same holds true, in Whorf ’s view, for all individual languages and people.