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The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who saw language as the expression of the spirit of a nation.
Members of the early 20th-century school of American anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also embraced forms of the idea to one extent or another, but Sapir in particular wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism.
“The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.” (1820)
Plato held that the world consisted in pregiven eternal ideas and that language in order to be true should strive to reflect these ideas as accurately as possible.
Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior.
Harry Hoijer, one of Sapir's students, introduced the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", even though the two scholars never actually advanced any such hypothesis.
Currently,
a balanced view of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better seen as subject to universal factors.
Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg who conducted experiments designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently.
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity has inspired many to think about how it might be possible to influence thought by consciously manipulating language.
Research is focused on exploring the ways and extent to which language influences thought.
A 1969 study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay demonstrated the existence of universal semantic constraints in the field of color terminology which was widely seen to discredit the existence of linguistic relativity in this domain, although this conclusion has been disputed by relativist researchers.
From the late 1980s a new school of linguistic relativity scholars have examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for weak versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.
Kenneth E. Iverson, the originator of the APL programming language, believed that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages.
Authors such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell have explored how linguistic relativity might be exploited for political purposes in their fictions.
Others have been fascinated by the possibilities of creating new languages that could enable new, and perhaps better, ways of thinking.
In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel-17, based on the Sapir–Whorf
Hypothesis.
Language entirely determines the range of possible cognitive processes of an individual.
The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now generally agreed to be false, but weaker forms of correlation are still being studied by many researchers, often producing positive empirical evidence for a correlation.
Another debate is the question about the relation between language and thought.
Whether human psychological faculties are mostly universal and innate or whether they are mostly a result of learning, and hence subject to cultural and social processes that vary between places and times.
Some philosophers and psychologists have tended to understand thought as basically a form of internal speech, suggesting that either this speech must be innate or thought has to be learned while acquiring language.
Constructivist
The contrary position
Idealist
Essentialist
Others have understood thought as experience and reason, to be independent of and prior to language.
Relativist
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world(world view), or otherwise influences their cognitive processes. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism.
Linguistic relativity:different formulations of the principle that cognitive processes such as thought and experience may be influenced by the categories and patterns of the language that a person speaks.
Misnomer:
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Benjamin Lee Whorf
Edward Sapir
The principle is often defined as having two versions:
(i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories;
(ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.