Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic relativity is the idea that the language a person speaks shapes how they perceive and think about the world, with a stronger claim, linguistic determinism, holding that language actually limits which thoughts and categories are available at all. The idea is usually traced to the linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, though neither of them ever formally stated it as a single hypothesis; it was Sapir's later student Harry Hoijer who coined the label Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the now familiar split between a weak and a strong version came from still later commentators rather than from Sapir or Whorf themselves. The underlying idea reaches back to the German Romantic Wilhelm von Humboldt in the nineteenth century and was developed further by early American anthropologists Franz Boas and Sapir, but it fell out of academic favor by the 1960s as Noam Chomsky's universal grammar took hold. Since the late 1980s the weaker version, that language nudges perception without strictly boxing it in, has drawn renewed interest and real empirical support from cognitive and linguistic anthropology.