Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic relativity, often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, holds that the grammatical categories built into a language influence how its speakers habitually perceive, think about and organize their experience of the world. Edward Sapir first argued that language shapes habitual thought, and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf developed the idea further from his own research into Hopi and other Indigenous American languages, arguing that differences between languages could produce genuinely different habitual ways of thinking about time, space and matter. The strongest version of the hypothesis, that language determines what a speaker can think at all, is not accepted by most linguists today, but a weaker version, that language habitually influences thought and attention, continues to be studied and tested experimentally.