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THE CENTRAL IDEA of the Sapir—Whorf hypothesis is that language is not simply a device for reporting experience but to a significant degree, defines experience for its speakers. Probably the earliest statement came in an article published by Edward Sapir in 1929 in which he says
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity … but are very much at the mercy of the language which has become the medium of expression for that society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is just an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication … the real world is, to a large extent, built up on the language habits of the group … it is a self-contained creative symbolic organization which not only refers to experience … but actually defines experience by reason of its formal completeness and because our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience.
Sapir pointed out that there was no such thing as a primitive language (supposedly spoken by Freud's primal horde). Even the most primitive societies speak a language with a complex grammatical structure. Recent observations on the development of children's language have shown that by the time a child utters his first words he is able to classify them into subject and predicate. Here the grammatical structuring is an example of the integrative functions of the human brain and speech is as much of a biological process as walking. While a child may speak the most difficult of languages with idiomatic ease, he is quite unconscious of its lexical and syntactic rules. Sapir studied the highly polysynthetic languages of the North American Indians (these represent the opposite pole