Benjamin Lee Whorf

Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on 24 April 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and died on 26 July 1941 in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Trained as a chemical engineer, he worked as a fire prevention inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company while studying linguistics independently and later under Edward Sapir at Yale University. Drawing on his research into Hopi and other Indigenous American languages, he argued that the grammatical categories built into a language condition the way its speakers habitually think about time, space and matter, a claim developed from Sapir's earlier observations that became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the principle of linguistic relativity.