ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the origins, history, and differential views of the relation between language and thought, from antiquity to the present era. It discusses the perspectives of major proponents of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, as it came to be called near the middle part of the twentieth century, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The chapter also presents critiques that have been articulated against the hypothesis, and discusses the various types of research methods that have been used to investigate it. An underlying theme of the chapter is that linguistic relativity was the founding principle of anthropological linguistics (now more commonly called linguistic anthropology) at the turn of the twentieth century.
