The proposal that language, by providing habitual modes of expression, predisposes people to see the world in a certain way ñ different for different languages ñ and thus guides their thinking and behaviour. Sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his student, the linguist Benjamin L. Whorf (1897-1943) who formulated it in the 1920s
. See Linguistics, Psychic unity of mankind, Relativism (or cultural relativism), Universalism