Edward Sapir Research Articles

Why Linguistics Needs the Cognitive Scientist

(2001). Why Linguistics Needs the Cognitive Scientist. Psychiatry: Vol. 64, No. 1, pp. 11-13.

Sapir's Vision of Culture and Personality

For Edward Sapir the concept of culture was a reification of processes that were rooted in individuals' personality and psychology. Sapir suggested that psychiatry's focus on individual biography and pathology gives it unique relevance for social science efforts to understand the mechanisms of cultural transmission and transformation. As a discipline that must integrate culture and biology in theory and practice, psychiatry can provide a corrective to the extremes of biological or cultural reductionism. Although mainstream psychiatry has largely abdicated the role it once had in the social sciences, the interdisciplinary field of cultural psychiatry may meet some of Sapir's hopes. Recent work in cultural psychiatry is centrally concerned with illness narratives that arise from the interaction of personal and collective meaning. Illness narratives may serve individual defensive functions, position individuals in a social world, and help to maintain overarching cultural formations. They also may challenge or subvert existing cultural meanings and create new forms of discourse. The close analysis of how cultural and individual meanings interact that is provided by cultural psychiatry has much to offer the wider field of cultural anthropology.

The Barbeau Archives at the Canadian Museum of Civilization: Some Current Research Problems

The archives containing the field research documents of the late C. Marius Barbeau (1883-1969) of the former National Museum of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization--hereinafter CMC) are extensive and complex. Although the Barbeau Archives were not generally accessible until the early 1990s, some ethnologists had access before that. In the years that they have been more accessible, the Archives have provided valuable data for scholars in many disciplines, especially Anthropology and Folklore Studies, but their full potential as a research base have hardly yet been realized. Under the present organization of the CMC the archives are administered by the Information Management Services Division, Information Access Services. The very able Client Archivist, with whom most researchers work to establish access to the Barbeau Archives, is Benoit Theriault, who has an enviable knowledge of the Barbeau holdings.The principal components of the Barbeau Archives contain a diverse range of materials on aboriginal, folkloric and historical materials from across Canada. They consist of documentary materials, sound archives (mostly of songs) transcribed from wax cylinders used in field research by Barbeau and other National Museum personnel, photographic archives (which even include photographs of potlatches in progress on the North Pacific Coast during the prohibition period), and an extensive correspondence with some of the leading ethnologists, musicians, public servants, politicians, artists, musicians and folklorists of Barbeau's day. In the Museum collections there are totem poles, clothing and basketry, silverware, clothing, religious items and folk art which he collected on his many journeys in North America.On appointment to the National Museum in 1911, Barbeau wanted to continue his work on the social organization, the subject of his thesis prepared under R.R. Marrett at Oxford. Edward Sapir as Chief of Ethnology urged him instead to begin immediately on assembling ethnographic documents relating to the Huron-Wyandot, and this was one of Barbeau's first tasks after his appointment to the Museum (Barbeau 1957-58: 57). Despite a widespread idea in Canadian popular thought, the Huron are not even now extinct in the sense of being eradicated; rather they were depopulated, dispersed and displaced. Barbeau interviewed Huron-Wyandot people particularly at Ancienne-Lorette near Quebec City and in Oklahoma, where many had taken up residence during the massive population displacements of Native peoples after the mid-17th century. Much of his work focussed on the displacement of the Huron and on their genealogies, many details of which were remembered early in the 1900s. Barbeaus's work was a kind of salvage ethnology, an attempt to document information which could have disappeared quickly. Incidentally to this task, he collected much Iroquois, Mohawk, and other materials from Eastern Woodlands groups. In addition to textual, photographic and sound archival recordings, Barbeau collected many objects in Quebec which now reside in the permanent collections of the CMC.Plate 1 [Not Transcribed]Perhaps the best known and largest component of the archives is the Barbeau-Beynon Northwest Coast Collection. Barbeau began work in the Prince Rupert area in 1915, and he spent periods of time residing in the Skeena area (for example he spent 1921-22 in Terrace, BC, the location of much of my own present work with the Kitselas First Nation). During that time he brought many visitors to the Skeena and Nass River areas, including artists such as (Sir) Ernest MacMillan, A.Y. Jackson, Emily Carr, Langdon Kihn, Edwin Holgate and others.(1) His aim was to promote some degree of intercultural stimulation between the Skeena and Nass peoples and the Canadian arts, as well as to secure the technical advice and active collaboration of experts in music and the arts. Musicians Ernest MacMillan and Alfred Laliberte, and artists A. …

Reply to Regna Darnell's "Toward a History of Canadian Departments of Anthropology"

After a promising surge of interest in 1970s, project of writing a history of Canadian anthropology appears to slipped into a state of somnolence. Regna Darnell has done more than anyone to wake us up to continuing importance of reflecting upon our history, not least in a typically lively and provocative to this journal (Darnell, 1998). I wish to respond to part of that comment here. First, I wish to protest Darnell's characterization of my attitude towards Edward Sapir's place in history of Canadian anthropology. Second, I want briefly to review evidence that convinces me that there were no direct Boasian influences in T.F. McIlwraith's field work among Nuxalk (Bella Coola) First Nation and in resulting monograph, The Bella Coola Indians. These are both very minor points Darnell touches upon in her paper. My comments are offered in spirit of building upon a fine and useful summary of state of our historical knowledge. I do not intend them as criticism of article as a whole.Darnell observes correctly that in Introduction to re-issued edition of The Bella Coola Indians I wrote that in from his position as Head of Anthropology Division in National Museum (Barker, 1992: xxv). I am embarrassed that I wrote retired instead of resigned, which is what I meant. All same, there is no justification for lumping me in with unnamed mass of Canadian anthropologists who, Darnell tells us, have been reluctant to recognize [Sapir's] contribution to Canadian anthropology (Darnell, 1998: 158). The Introduction is about T.F. McIlwraith and Nuxalk, not Sapir and development of Canadian anthropology. It is very clear from sentence and paragraph which contain offending phrase that I am referring only to undisputed fact that Diamond Jenness took over Anthropology Division after Sapir's departure in 1925. It is beyond me how anyone could construe any part of that Introduction as denying or belittling the continuing ties between Canadian and American anthropologies, if by this odd phrase Darnell means that Canadian anthropologists continued to be influenced by writings of their American colleagues after 1925 (ibid.). Sometimes a slip is just a slip -- not a slight.I turn now to question of American versus British influences upon McIlwraith's research and writing concerning Nuxalk people. Franz Boas casts such a huge shadow upon Northwest ethnology that it is not surprising that minor figures, like McIlwraith, tend to get subsumed into category of follower. Suttles and Jonaitis (1990: 78), for instance, list McIlwraith along with Jenness and Barbeau under heading of Boas's Students and Their Students, solely it would seem because of their association with Sapir. As Darnell notes, I also initially perceived Boasian elements to McIlwraith's approach to field work, especially attention he paid to texts (Barker, 1987: 255). Bruce Trigger, who began his distinguished career as an undergraduate student of McIlwraith's, provides some of most compelling evidence of an American influence. After securing a scholarship to send Trigger to Yale, McIlwraith confided that he thought of himself as a Boasian and regarded The Bella Coola Indians as an example of a Boasian study (Trigger, personal communication; cf. Darnell, 1998: 158). Trigger was left with impression that McIlwraith had spent a year at Yale's Peabody Museum after leaving Cambridge. That year inspired McIlwraith's keen interest in museum work and shaped his approach to Nuxalk field work.What I initially saw as Boasian influences dissolved upon a closer study of McIlwraith's detailed correspondence and text of The Bella Coola Indians itself. McIlwraith was no Boasian, at least in early 1920s. We can only speculate about why professor would later insist to one of his most promising students that he was a Yale man. …

Language and Self in Cross-Cultural Autobiography: Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation

scale of the problem of emigrating into a new linguistic environment is suggested with particular subtlety and force by the title of the Polish-Canadian1 author Eva Hoffman's autobiography: in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989). second half of the title answers the question implicitly posed by the first: it is the immigrant's whole life before emigration that is imagined as in translation, by analogy with the meaning of a literary text. Lost refers likewise to the author herself, who is at once lost as in a maze or in a reverie, in the activity of translating from Polish into English cultural perspectives-and, more poignantly, in danger of losing her very in the course of the translation. metaphor of fidelity to an original is an especially suggestive one in the context of an immigrant's life: are the cultural assumptions with which he or she arrives susceptible to extension and revision, and to what extent can a self ' be identified with them? Problems of translation may pertain as much to selves inducted into a new language and culture as to texts to be rendered in a new linguistic code. In a lecture of 1934 which has been posthumously entitled The Difficulty of Delimiting a Boundary Between Personality and Culture, the linguist and pioneer of cultural psychology, Edward Sapir, himself a child immigrant, has written: [The attitude comprised in the individual's nuclear personality has an analogue in a cultural attitude, or what we might call] cultural loyalties-loyalties imbibed from your own culture which makes you a little insensitive to the meanings in different cultures. You are obtuse to meanings that are not welcome, that do not fit into the old scheme of things.... [Consider what happens to a person upon] entering a new cultural environment. essential invariance of personality makes one alive and sensitive to some things and obtuse to others, [depending upon how the] new environment [matches up with] pivotal points from the old. [Your] awareness of certain things in a new cultural [setting] is a test of the old one, [a test of what the old one's pivotal points in fact were.] 2 Sapir's definition of culture as what makes its bearers obtuse to the systems of understanding prevailing elsewhere is both relative and negative, not unlike de Saussure's classic definition of meaning in terms of valeur, the relations which obtain between linguistic signs. Seen from within, a culture is infinitely more than what makes it unintelligible to outsiders. Similarly, the notion of the invariance of personality now seems to smack of an archaic essentialism. On both counts, however, taken as mutually inclusive by Sapir, his formulation coincides revealingly with a recurrent theme in immigrant and ethnic autobiographical narratives. This could be summed up as the sensation of switching personalities across the cultures and languages of their experience, in the words of Japanese-American autobiographer, Monica Sone.3 In this article I will be discussing how Eva Hoffman's autobiography bears out Sapir's intuition, while rendering his terms both more dynamic and more personal through the medium of her metaphor of self-translation. in Translation offers insights into questions of the relation between language, culture and selfhood which are of a broad theoretical interest, potentially illuminating the condition of bilingual and bicultural authors ranging from Vladimir Nabokov to Kazuo Ishiguro. In his book Dickens and Romantic Psychology: Self in Time in Nineteenth-Century Literature,4 Dirk den Hartog argues for the presence of an underlying, informing dialectic in the work of Dickens and other nineteenthcentury writers. This dialectic represents the clash of two Romantic traditions, drawn under the encompassing terms and Byronic. What Hartog calls the Wordsworthian tradition is in essence one of allegiance to one's memories of childhood, as to a potential source of stability and integrity for the self. …

Camelot at Yale: The Construction and Dismantling of the Sapirian Synthesis, 1931‐39

For a brief shining moment in the 1930s, Edward Sapir stood at the forefront of a new synthesis of Boasian ethnology and linguistics. But his call to Yale in 1931 was a mandate taken up against formidable odds, and the grand synthesis soon began to unravel. George Peter Murdock, who became chairman in 1939, moved the department toward science and “verified theory.” In the period immediately following World War II, Sapir's program was not revived, but its legacies have come to us by way of the Yale ethnoscience and linguistic anthropology of the 1960s, and his synthesis remains a viable option for Americanist anthropology at the millennium.

Distributive Models of Culture: A Sapirian Alternative to Essentialism

The Boasian conception of culture has been roundly criticized in recent years for its essentialist, or even racist, implications. Yet an alternative model that avoids these implications was proposed in the 1930s by Boas student Edward Sapir. Having long survived on the margins of anthropological theory, Sapir's “distributive” concept of culture is now entering the theoretical mainstream through recent developments in both psychological and “postmodernist” anthropology.By emphasizing the full range of variation within any so‐called culture, anthropologists have begun to apply the same style of population thinking that helped launch the Darwinian revolution in biology.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, Edward Sapir, and the constructivist framework

SummaryStriking similarities between Edward Sapir’s views on language and those of Wilhelm von Humboldt have long been apparent. Because of the avoidance of documentation in his writings, however, it has proved to be impossible to demonstrate the extent of Sapir’s direct familiarity with the works of Humboldt and his commitment to a Humboldtian language philosophy. Rather than pursuing the question of how Sapir might have been influenced by Humboldt, the present article explores the Sapirian philosophical framework for the treatment of both language and culture in comparison with that found in the works of Humboldt. It is shown that even without direct evidence of the influence of the works of Humboldt on Sapir it is possible to see in Sapir’s writings on language, cultural anthropology, and even aesthetics a commitment to a general constructivist philosophical framework remarkably similar to that found in Humboldt.

New World African Ritual: Genuine and Spurious

Following traditions established by Melville J. Herskovits and Roger Bastide, the literature on African-American religions emphasizes accommodation, acculturation, and syncretism at the level of culture, without adequate attention to the role of individual decision making in religious change. As a result, many anthropological studies stress the adaptability of religious systems but pay scant attention to the limits of religious accommodation. Using examples including Spiritual Baptism and its mourning ceremony, this paper shows that Afro-Caribbean religion is highly adaptable but not infinitely so. Throughout the New World, however, the degree of African religious tradition preserved during the Diaspora varies widely and is a matter of lively concern to adherents. Edward Sapir's contrast between genuine and spurious culture is especially useful in understanding the issues of origin, acculturation and authenticity now important to Afro-Caribbean religious believers as well as to scholars.

The Collected Works of Edward Sapir IV: Ethnology

The Collected Works of Edward Sapir IV: Ethnology

Linguistic Relativity in French, English, and German Philosophy

In our century philosophy has indeed taken a turn, both the AngloAmerican analytic tradition (in the work of Russell, Wittgenstein, and subsequent logicians), and the Continental tradition, which has been deeply influenced by Saussurean structuralism, as well as by Lacan's notion of language as a mirror of consciousness, and Heidegger's concept of language as the house of being. Most philosophical discussion, however, has considered language as an essentially undifferentiated whole, treating, for example, such problems as the role of language general acquiring knowledge (Gadamer), the significance of metaphor general understanding (Ricoeur), the possibility of a ambiguity language (Derrida), and so on. Apart from such studies as Quine's theory of untranslatability (which is, any case, rather abstract) there has been surprisingly little attention paid by philosophers to the important question of differences between real language--what factors are involved diachronic language change, why there should be hundreds of extant languages, etc. Even the linguists' eminently philosophy-oriented hypothesis of language-thought relativity (the theory that the grammars of different languages might cause their speakers to develop different world views), first investigated by Wilhelm von Humboldt the early 1800's and further developed by prominent 20th century linguists (in America, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf; Germany, Leo Weisgerber and Jost Trier), has not been treated a significant way by recent philosophers. Certainly, though, the theory has profound import for philosophy, not least of all philosophy's self-examination, as it attempts to determine causes for the variety of philosophic schools that have traditionally formed, not only from shared political ideologies, historical determinism, and perpetuation of respect for teachers and tradition, but also along linguistic lines. In the synthesis of environmental and genetic factors that create philosophic world views (and cultural views general), syntactic and semantic differences between languages might constitute a larger ingredient than has generally been acknowledged. As Edward Sapir rather pointedly states an essay written for H. L. Mencken's American Mercury 1924: To a far greater extent than the philosopher has realized, he likely to become the dupe of his speech-forms, which equivalent to saying that the mould of his thought, which typically a linguistic mould, apt to be projected into his conception of the world. Thus innocent linguistic categories may take on the formidable appearance of cosmic absolutes. If only, therefore, to save himself from philosophic verbalism, it would be well for the philosopher to look critically to the linguistic foundations and limitations of his thoughts. (157) The current situation linguistics has not been very much more favourable than that academic philosophy to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Dominated by Noam Chomsky's oft-revised attempts at a structuralist universal generative grammar, linguists have likewise devoted comparatively slight attention to the theory of language-thought relativism; but Chomskyan and relativist theories are not necessarily mutually incompatible. Even Chomsky, who holds that human knowledge and understanding language and thought is not derived by induction.... Rather, it grows the mind, on the basis of our biological nature, triggered by appropriate experience, admits that cognitive and linguistic understanding in a way shaped by experience that settles options left open by the innate structure of the mind (Sophia Linguistica, p. 25).1 This limited shaping of languagethought by experience remains, however, undefined by Chomsky; presumably it an amalgam of individual and group experience (including the linguistic); and intercultural world view differences, insofar as they are non-innate (i.e., non-genetic), must then, for the Chomskyan structuralists, be experientially shaped. …

Language Polygenesis: A Probabilistic Model.

Monogenesis of language is widely accepted, but the conventional argument seems to be mistaken; a simple probabilistic model shows that polygenesis is likely. Other prehistoric inventions are discussed, as are problems in tracing linguistic lineages. Language is a system of representations; within such a system, words can evoke complex and systematic responses. Along with its social functions, language is important to humans as a mental instrument. Indeed, the invention of language,that is the accumulation of symbols to represent emotions, objects, and acts may be the most important event in human evolution, because so many developments follow from it. For example, Edward Sapir speculated that some embryonic form of language must have been available to early man to help him fashion tools from stone (Sapir,1921). Sophisticated biface stone tools date to early Homo erectus some 1.5 million years ago, suggesting a similar age for language. This paper considers whether the invention of language occurred at only one pre-historic site or at several sites. In other words, did language emerge by monogenesis or polygenesis? Early thinkers believed in monogenesis, against a background of divine creation. Perhaps the best known account is the biblical story of Adam giving names to plants and animals in the Garden of Eden. Similar legends are found among many peoples. Modern linguists too assume monogenesis, but on probabilistic grounds (see, for instance, Southworth and Daswani, 1974, p.314). The argument seems to be that the invention of language is an extremely unlikely event, because symbolization involves abstraction and requires synchronized insight by several individuals; therefore, the probability of occurrence at more than one site must be vanishingly small. We have found no explicit quantitative treatment of this question in the literature, but the underlying logic has to be the multiplication of probabilities. If p is small at one site,then p.p for two sites is smaller still, and so on. This reasoning is false, as we show here. The fallacy lies in the focus on two particular sites rather than consideration of all pairs of sites.

Culture, genuine and spurious: the politics of Indianness in the Vaupés, Colombia

In this article I use Edward Sapir's (1924) famous phrase as a theme to explore how Tukanoans of Colombia's Northwest Amazon are learning to change their notions of their own history and culture to achieve a better fit with received wisdom about Indianness. Situated in a highly politicized context, this process involves local and national Indian rights organizations and sympathetic international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I also briefly address the issue of ethnographic authority—the confrontation between anthropological and native visions of indigenous culture and history. [Northwest Amazon, indigenous mobilizing, identity politics, construction of culture, ethnic nationalism]

The Psychology of Culture: A course of lectures. By Edward Sapir

The Psychology of Culture: A course of lectures. By Edward Sapir

Obituary: Clarence Lewis Barnhart, 1900-1993

Obituary Clarence Lewis Barnhart, 1900-1993 The death of Clarence Barnhart has taken away America's preeminent lexicographer. This is so generally acknowledged that I need not dwell on it. My own acquaintance with him began in the 1930s while I was at the University of Chicago as an assistant to Sir William Craigie on the Dictionary of American English. Clarence was living in an apartment on the Midway, with an already growing family, where I visited him many times, and we often went out for meals together. Already he had had an exciting life. He was born in southern Missouri, in the west central Ozarks, just one day before the end of the 19th century, on December 30, 1900. He grew up in a religious family, where he was expected to become a minister, as he himself did. The members of his church at Hutchinson, Kansas, arranged for a fouryear scholarship at Transylvania College in Kentucky, but by the end of his freshman year he had "lost his faith" and with great honesty and courage gave up the scholarship. His church friends were bitter about it, and he was deeply hurt by the experience. He then enrolled at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, but the deep depression of the 1920s (it hit the Middle West a decade before it came to New York) prevented him financially from continuing. Then when he was a bill collector in Oklahoma and Texas, an old high school friend, Al Goodwin, encouraged him to come to Chicago, and he got a job in the shipping room at Scott, Foresman and Co. This enabled him to work for his B.A. at the University of Chicago, which he received in 1930. He was so good as a student that he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year; the aberrations of Robert Maynard Hutchins had not fazed him. At Scott, Foresman, he moved from the shipping room to a position as file clerk in the editorial offices where he was able to write some memoranda for the editor who was working on the contributions of Edward L. Thorndike. These memoranda were passed on to Thorndike without change, and he was soon promoted to an editorial position. He found Thorndike's innovations and fresh attitude toward lexicography congenial, and the association resulted in the important group of Thorndike-Barnhart school dictionaries. The nature of their Obituary_____ 217 work is well told in Barnhart's survey, "Contributions of Dr. Thorndike to Lexicography," in the Teachers College Record, 51 (October, 1949), 35-42. They took advantage of the great ferment that was taking place as a result of die brilliant insights of Leonard Bloomfield. Barnhart himself took graduate courses widi Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Sir William Craigie, and James Root Hulbert, but his professional achievements had put him beyond the need of a doctorate. In the course of World War II he was asked to produce a dictionary of military terms. A project that had begun in the 1930s under the WPA (Works Progress Administration) was moved to the War Department and continued under die direction of die noted literary figure Leonard Bacon, and a large body of quotations was assembled. By arrangements widi the American Council of Learned Societies, Barnhart took a leave of absence from Scott, Foresman and accepted die editorship of what became die Dictionary of United States Army Terms, Technical Manual 20-205. The office was at 165 Broadway in New York City, a wing of Henry Lee Smith's Language unit, but kept separate in administration and funding. He brought in some workers well known to him, such as Harrison G. Piatt and Thorndike's sister Mildred, but he had to put up widi some military figures. One of diem, a Major, was asked to shorten a set of definitions, and he cut each one exactly in half, keeping die first half and discarding die second. The result was so ludicrous that Clarence was set into gales of laughter. The 7,000 terms in the dictionary were cut down from a preliminary list about three times as large. It was issued on January 18, 1944, but marked "Restricted." As its title...

Edward Sapir and the "Sino-Dene" Hypothesis.

The American scholar Edward Sapir proposed that the Na-Dene languages of North America (Haida, Tlingit, Eyak, Athabaskan) are genetically related to the Sino-Tibetan languages of Asia (Sinitic, Karenic, Tibeto-Burman). Sapir and other linguists have found correspondences between the phonetic systems, and more importantly, the grammar and basic vocabulary of both families. It is maintained here that Spair was essentially correct about this genetic connection (“Sino-Dene”), and that there is no evidence that he ever retracted it. Recent research corroborates Sapir's hypothesis and indicates the high probability of a widespread Dene-Caucasian family, which dispersed some 11, 000 years ago. Some new linguistic evidence for this family is also presented here for the first time.

Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis.

Language Diversity and Thought examines the Sapir–Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis: the proposal that the grammar of the particular language we speak affects the way we think about reality. Adopting an historical approach, the book reviews the various lines of empirical inquiry which arose in America in response to the ideas of anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin L. Whorf. John Lucy asks why there has been so little fruitful empirical research on this problem and what lessons can be learned from past work. He then proposes a new, more adequate approach to future empirical research. A companion volume, Grammatical Categories and Cognition, illustrates the proposed approach with an original case study. The study compares the grammar of American English with that of Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language spoken in southeastern Mexico, and then identifies distinctive patterns of thinking related to the differences between the two languages.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access R. DARNELL: Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist. University of California Press, 1990. Jill Bourne Jill Bourne Open University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, Volume 14, Issue 2, June 1993, Pages 212–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/14.2.212 Published: 01 June 1993 Article history Received: 01 March 1992 Published: 01 June 1993

Photography and the imagined body

In the study of body behavior, linguistics, semiology and photography can contribute to a new understanding of kinesics. The field of semiotics is part of linguistics because language is a dynamic process of the here and how. Photo elicitation can show both the dynamic and expressive aspect of language. Its method unravels individual semiotic constructions that can pose questions toward scientific theories. The roots for a scientific theory of individual semiotics can be found in the work of Roland Barthes and Edward Sapir.

The Sapir‐Whorf Hypothesis: A Preliminary History and a Bibliographical Essay

This article presents a historical overview of linguistic ideas in relation to the Sapir‐Whorf Hypothesis. The source of the hypothesis is found in the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and further development is found in the writings of Heymann Steinthal, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Carl Voegelin, and Dell Hymes, among others. Humboldtian ideas have had a long‐standing impact on American ethnolinguistics.