[Edit] History

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The position that language anchors thought (thinking is shabdanA or 'languaging') was argued cogently by Bhartrihari (6th c. AD) and was the subject of centuries of debate in the Indian linguistic tradition. Related notions in the West, such as the axiom that language has controlling effects upon thought, can be traced to Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium ("On the comparative study of languages"), and the notion has been largely assimilated into Western thought. Karl Kerenyi began his 1976 English language translation of Dionysus with this passage:

“

The interdependence of thought and speech makes it clear that languages are not so much a means of expressing truth that has already been established, but are a means of discovering truth that was previously unknown. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways of looking at the world.

”

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The origin of the SWH as a more rigorous examination of this familiar cultural perception can be traced back to the work of Franz Boas, the founder of anthropology in the United States. Boas was educated in Germany in the late 19th century at a time when scientists such as Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann were attempting to understand the physiology of sensation.

One important philosophical approach at the time was a revival of interest in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant claimed that knowledge was the result of concrete cognitive work on the part of an individual person—reality ("sensuous intuition") was inherently in flux and understanding resulted when someone took that intuition and interpreted it via their "categories of the understanding." Different individuals may thus perceive the same noumenal reality as phenomenal instances of their different, individual concepts.

In the United States, Boas encountered Native American languages from many different linguistic families—all of which were quite different from the Semitic and Indo-European languages which most European scholars studied. Boas came to realize how greatly ways of life and grammatical categories could vary from one place to another. As a result he came to believe that the culture and lifeways of a people were reflected in the language that they spoke.

Sapir was one of Boas' star students. He furthered Boas' argument by noting that languages were systematic, formally complete systems. Thus, it was not this or that particular word that expressed a particular mode of thought or behavior, but that the coherent and systematic nature of language interacted at a wider level with thought and behavior. While his views changed over time, it seems that towards the end of his life Sapir came to believe that language did not merely mirror culture and habitual action, but that language and thought might in fact be in a relationship of mutual influence or perhaps even determination.

Whorf gave this idea greater precision by examining the particular grammatical mechanisms by which thought influenced language. He argued his point thus:

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language... all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."

— (Language, Thought and Reality pp. 212–214).

Whorf's formulation of this "principle of linguistic relativity" is often^{[citation needed]} stereotyped as a "prisonhouse" view of language in which one's thinking and behavior is completely and utterly shaped by one's language. While some people^{[citation needed]} might make this "vulgar Whorfian" argument, Whorf himself sought merely to insist that thought and action were linguistically and socially mediated. In doing so he opposed what he called a "natural logic" position which he claimed believed "talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to 'express' what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically" (Language, Thought and Reality p. 207). On this account, he argued, "thought does not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe" (Language, Thought and Reality p. 208).

Whorf's close analysis of the differences between English and (in one famous instance) the Hopi language raised the bar for an analysis of the relationship between language, thought, and reality by relying on close analysis of grammatical structure, rather than a more impressionistic account of the differences between, say, vocabulary items in a language. For example, "Standard Average European" (SAE) – i.e., Western languages in general – tends to analyse reality as objects in space: the present and future are thought of as "places", and time is a path linking them. A phrase like "three days" is grammatically equivalent to "three apples", or "three kilometres". Other languages, including many Native American languages, are oriented towards process. To monolingual speakers of such languages, the concrete/spatial metaphors of SAE grammar may make little sense. Whorf himself claimed that his work on the SWH was inspired by his insight that a Hopi speaker would find relativistic physics fundamentally easier to grasp than an SAE speaker would.

As a result of his status as a student and not as a professional linguist, Whorf's work on linguistic relativity, conducted largely in the late 1930s, did not become popular until the posthumous publication of his writings in the 1950s. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis influenced the development and standardization of Interlingua during the first half of the 20th century, but this was largely due to Sapir's direct involvement. In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown created the Loglan constructed language (Lojban, a reformed variant of Loglan, still exists as a living language) in order to test the hypothesis. However, no such experiment was ever conducted. Linguistic theories of the 1960s— such as those proposed by Noam Chomsky —focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result Whorf's work fell out of favor. An example of a recent Chomskian approach to this issue is Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct. Pinker argues from a contravening school of thought that holds that some sort of universal grammar underlies all language. The most extreme proponents of this theory, such as Pinker, argue that thought is independent of language, and that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in what is called “natural” language, which is to say in any of the languages that we actually speak or write, but rather, we think in a meta-language that precedes any spoken language; this language of thought is called “mentalese”. Pinker refers to "Whorf’s radical position," and argues vehemently against the Whorfian idea that language contains thought and culture, going so far as to declare, "the more you examine Whorf’s arguments, the less sense they make." (1994, p. 60)

A more 'Whorfian' approach is represented by George Lakoff, who has argued all language is essentially metaphor.^{[citation needed]} For instance, English employs many metaphorical tropes that in one way or another equate time with money, e.g.:

spend time

waste time

invest time

A Whorfian interpretation would be that this usage influences the way English speakers conceive the abstract quality of "time". For another example, political arguments are shaped by the web of conceptual metaphors that underlie language use. In political debates, it matters a great deal whether one is arguing in favor of the "right to life" or against the "right to choose"; whether one is discussing "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers".

In the late 1980s and early 1990s advances in cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Today researchers disagree — often intensely — about how strongly language influences thought. However, this disagreement has sparked increasing interest in the issue and a great deal of innovative and important research.