How do linguists describe culture?

Linguists try to discover patterns of syntactic acquisition that hold cross-linguistically, in an effort to uncover universals of our linguistic endowment. In the linguistic relativity interpretation, the difference between languages is not what can be said but what is relatively easy to say. The classic example is vocabulary (Hall, 47).

To understand how language can be a barrier, we need to go back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in order to account for the differences in languages across cultures. Scholars have divided the hypothesis into the linguistic determinist interpretation and the linguistic relativity interpretation. The linguistic determinist interpretation ...