Precursors and historical background

The term and the notion of ‘linguistic relativity’ are usually associated with the names of the American linguist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who developed the ideas of Sapir’s teacher Franz Boas (1858–1942), one of the founders of North American anthropology and linguistics. For these scholars, the diversity of languages was one of the central facts about human beings and potentially, at least, had implications for conceptualization of natural and social situations. In the 1920s and 1930s, Sapir and Whorf both proposed a ‘principle of linguistic relativity’ with an explicit reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity: This amounted to maintaining that differences between the languages of speaker and analyst constituted a factor that had to be taken explicitly into account in any analysis of social and cultural life – just as in Einstein’s relativity, the velocity and direction of the measurer him- or herself had to figure in the determination of those of any other entity. In neither case was there a privileged fixed point or centre from which everything else could be judged.