According to him, languages with an inflectional morphological type, such as German, English and the other Indo-European languages were the most perfect languages and this explained the dominance of their speakers over the speakers of less perfect languages. Then, Benjamin Lee Whorf concluded that differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers perceived the world.īut, before Sapir and Whorf, the German scientist Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820: “The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world”. Proponents of linguistic determinism argue that such differences between languages influence the ways people think-perhaps the ways in which whole cultures are organized.Īlso known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the principle is often defined to include two versions: the strong hypothesis and the weak hypothesis: the strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.Īccording to Edward Sapir, “no two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached”. In order to speak any language, you have to pay attention to the meanings that are grammatically marked in that language.
The linguistic relativity principle is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.
Different theorists have tried to explain this situation in different ways. No one would disagree with the claim that language and thought interact in many significant ways.
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