We build on the work by Peled and Bonotti to illuminate the impact of linguistic relativity on democratic debate. Peled and Bonotti’s focus is on multilingual societies, and their worry is that ‘unconscious epistemic effects’ can undermine political reasoning between interlocutors who do not share the same native tongue. Our article makes two contributions. First, we argue that Peled and Bonotti’s concerns about linguistic relativity are just as relevant to monolingual discourse. We use machine learning to provide novel evidence of the linguistic discrepancies between two ideologically distant groups that speak the same language: readers of Breitbart and of The New York Times. We suggest that intralinguistic relativity can be at least as harmful to successful public deliberation and political negotiation as interlinguistic relativity. Second, we endorse the building of metalinguistic awareness to address problematic kinds of linguistic relativity and argue that the method of discourse analysis we use in this article is a good way to build that awareness.

我们以 Peled 和 Bonotti 的工作为基础，阐明语言相对论对民主辩论的影响。Peled 和 Bonotti 的重点是多语言社会，他们担心“无意识的认知效应”会破坏不同母语的对话者之间的政治推理。我们的文章有两个贡献。首先，我们认为 Peled 和 Bonotti 对语言相对性的关注与单语话语同样相关。我们使用机器学习来提供新的证据，证明两个在意识形态上相距甚远的说同一种语言的群体之间存在语言差异：Breitbart和纽约时报的读者. 我们认为，语言内相对论对成功的公共审议和政治谈判的危害至少与语言间相对论一样。其次，我们支持建立元语言意识以解决有问题的语言相对性，并认为我们在本文中使用的话语分析方法是建立这种意识的好方法。