One of Sapir’s students, Benjamin Lee Whorf, further developed the proposition that there is a systematic relationship between categories of language and thinking. Furthermore, Sapir believed that we see and hear and otherwise experience the world very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. Instead, he posited that the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached to them. Rather, he argued that no two languages are ever sufficiently similar such that they could represent the same reality. However, research findings remain inconclusive, and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a subject that scholars continue to investigate.įrom his studies of the research of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his own research on languages, Sapir concluded that there is clearly a connection between language and thought however, he did not clearly state whether he believed that language determined thought.

They have conducted research based on their conceptualization of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the hopes of finding empirical evidence to support it. Scholars in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, education, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, have disagreed about the role of language in thinking and how Sapir and Whorf intended to conceptualize that relationship. Consequently, because of its lack of specificity, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been a controversial idea since its inception in the 1920s and 1930s. However, neither theorist specified exactly the relationship between language and thought that is, whether he believed that language determines thinking or just influences it. Scholars also interpret the hypothesis as standing for the proposition that differences in the structure of languages produce differences in how people think (linguistic determinism). Sapir and Whorf posited that the particular language we speak influences the way we see reality because categories and distinctions encoded in one language are not always available in another language (linguistic relativity). Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) developed the idea known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Sapir language