Concept

Standard Average European

Overview

Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept originally introduced in 1936 by American linguist Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe with shared common features. Whorf argued that the SAE languages were characterized by a number of similarities, including syntax and grammar, vocabulary and its use, as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms, and word order, which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities, in essence creating a continental sprachbund. His intention was to argue that the disproportionate amount of SAE-specific knowledge in linguistics created a substantial SAE-centric bias, leading to generalization errors, such as mistaking linguistic features idiosyncratic to the SAE language group for universal tendencies.

Whorf contrasted what he called the SAE tense system (which contrasts past, present and future tenses) with that of the Hopi language of North America, which Whorf analyzed as being based on a distinction not of tense, but on things that have in fact occurred (a realis mood encompassing SAE past and present) compared to things that have as yet not occurred, but which may or may not occur in the future (irrealis mood). The accuracy of Whorf's analysis of Hopi tense later became a point of controversy in linguistics.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest integration. How small is the degree of this integration, however, when compared with that reached in well-developed languages is shown both by the great length of the compound words used for things and acts of constant…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Standard Average European is.
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In language, in the same manner, every case of every noun, and every tense of every verb, was originally expressed by a particular distinct word, which served for this purpose and for no other. But succeeding observations discovered, that one set of words was capable of supplying the place of all that infinite number, and that four or five prepositions, and half a dozen auxiliary verbs, were capable of answering the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
Close in meaning to Standard Average European; the term itself is not named.
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Hence the narrowest education which can claim to be at all complete includes Latin, one modern language, some history, some English literature, and one science." There is much in the wording of this passage which is irrelevant to our point and which must be discounted to make it clear. The phraseology betrays the particular provincial tradition within which the author is writing. There is the unquestioned assumption…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Close in meaning to Standard Average European; the term itself is not named.
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Linguistic determinism.

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