Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir was born on 26 January 1884 in Lauenburg, Pomerania, and died on 4 February 1939 in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied under the anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University and went on to document numerous Indigenous languages of North America. Sapir argued that a language's grammatical structure shapes how its speakers habitually perceive and organize experience, an idea his student Benjamin Lee Whorf later developed into what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity. His 1921 book Language, an introduction to the study of speech, remained influential for decades, and he is regarded as a founder of both ethnolinguistics and the American descriptive school of structural linguistics.