Introduction

The death of Sapir in 1939 and of Whorf in 1941 in combination with the Second World War created a brief hiatus in research. Interest was revived during the post-war period sparked in part by the appearance in 1949 of a collection of Sapir's writings (Mandelbaum, 1949) and the reprinting of four of Whorf's papers on the relation of language to thought (Trager, 1950 [1949]). Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis was a subject of active concern for a broad range of scholars and played a crucial role in the growing recognition during this period of the importance of language in human psychological and social functioning. Despite this widespread interest, a comparatively small amount of actual empirical research was undertaken. After this period, interest in the hypothesis waned with the advent of the transformational approach in linguistics with its presumptive nativism and universalism. Only within the last decade has interest in the hypothesis revived, so it is to this earlier period that we must look for much of what little empirical work exists.

Most research on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis during this period was developed within the fields of anthropological linguistics and comparative psycholinguistics. Most of these studies take Whorf's formulations as their point of departure whether they are building on his work or being critical of it. This chapter and the next review relevant empirical studies developed within anthropological linguistics; studies within comparative psycholinguistics are taken up in two subsequent chapters.