He was also active as a poet, scholar, and composer. In 1931 he accepted a professorship at Yale University, where he continued to write essays and articles on American Indian languages and cultures and established a department of anthropology. Through this book and his own teaching, Sapir became one of the principal developers of a US school of structural linguistics and a founder of ethnolinguistics.įrom 1925 to 1931 Sapir worked at the University of Chicago in 1929 he suggested that the numerous languages of the American Indians could be classified into six divisions. He argued that language and culture were interdependent and that the study of language might explain the diverse behaviour of people from different cultural backgrounds. It was during this time that Sapir wrote his book Language (1921), in which he presented his thesis that language should be studied within its social context. After brief periods at California and Pennsylvania universities, Sapir moved to Ottawa in 1910 and spent the next fifteen years studying Nootka and other Canadian Indian languages in his capacity as chief of anthropology at the Canadian National Museum.
He was then persuaded by the prominent anthropologist Franz Boas to study the languages of the American Indians from an anthropological point of view. Variability in place and time, and what are its relations to other fundamental human interests-the problem of thought, the nature of the historical process, race, culture, art.German-born US linguist and anthropologist.īorn in Lauenberg, Germany, Sapir went to the USA in 1889, at the age of five, and graduated from Columbia University, where he studied German philology, in 1904.
In Sapir’s own words, it aims to show “what I conceive language to be, what is its Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech is just one example of work by this prolific writer. Whilst it gained much attention when first proposed it has now largely been debunked. It is the claim that one’s particular language shapes one’s worldview and that some concepts, for some people, are unthinkable because their particular language has no names for those concepts. In brief, it is the idea that thought is the same thing as language. This still remains a favourite for those undertaking speech therapy education and, in particular, the study of linguistics. He is also famed for his work with Benjamin Lee Whorf on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. He was noted for his research into the relationship between culture and language – a field which came to be known as ethnolinguistics. An Introduction to the Study of Speech Originally published in 1921 by Harcourt Brace (New York, USA)Įdward Sapir ( – ) was an American linguist and anthropologist.
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