Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir was a German-born American linguist and anthropologist, trained under Franz Boas, who became one of the most influential figures in early American structural linguistics. He carried out extensive descriptive fieldwork on Native American languages across several unrelated families, arguing throughout his career that a language's grammatical structure shapes the habitual thought of its speakers, an idea his student Benjamin Lee Whorf later extended into what became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity. His 1921 book Language remained a standard introduction to the discipline for decades.