Named after linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, though they never formally collaborated on this theory, and it was named by later researchers.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity, proposes that the language a person speaks influences or determines how they perceive and think about the world. It suggests that structural differences between languages lead to different cognitive patterns, with strong versions suggesting language determines thought and weaker versions suggesting it merely influences it.
