Where meanings converge and diverge: Revisiting linguistic relativity across 81 languages

The study investigates whether speakers of different languages organize concepts similarly, a core question of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Using word embeddings from two multilingual models, the authors compared relations among 196 basic concepts across 81 languages and found that cross‑language correspondence is stronger for sociocultural meanings than for nature and motion. They also observed that relational differences within the sociocultural domain grow with geographic separation, indicating that universality and relativity are intertwined across conceptual domains.

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