Benjamin Whorf was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts on April 24, 1897. His father, Harry Church Whorf was a commercial artist, author, photographer, stage designer and playwright. Benjamin Lee Whorf was the eldest of three sons. His early interests included Botany, Astrology, Mexican History, Mayan Archeology and Photography. In 1913, Whorf graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1919 he was appointed an Engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. He settled in Hartford and married Celia Inez Peckham in 1920. They had three children, Raymond, Robert and Celia. Throughout his life, Whorf was known as a Chemical Engineer, a Linguist, and an Anthropologist.
Whorf began studying Linguistics at Yale University in 1931 because he was concerned about the conflict between science and religion. Interested in the American Indians, he began to study the Hopi language while at Yale University under the supervision of Edward Sapir. In 1936, Whorf was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at Yale and in 1937 the university awarded him the Sterling Fellowship. He was a Lecturer in Anthropology from 1937-1938. Whorf studied Linguistics in his spare time as a way to create an understanding of how language worked and unfortunately, he died before much of his studies could be proven.
In the field of Linguistics, Whorf worked in the areas of Linguistic Anthropology, Psychological Linguistics, Mayan hieroglyphics and a dictionary of Hopi languages. Whorf argued that " language is shaped by culture and reflects the individual actions of people daily" (Turner: 836). He felt that language shaped a person's view and influenced thoughts. Today, many linguists agree with Whorf's studies. His studies, though not all were proven, helped future linguists in their studies.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: It is generally accepted by Ethnolinguists that culture influences language but there is far less agreement about the possibility that language influences culture. Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Whorf, suggested that language affects how people perceive their reality, that language coerces thought. This is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Simply stated, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis says that the content of a language is directly related to the content of a culture and the structure of a language is directly related to the structure of a culture.
On July 26,1941, at the age of 44, Whorf died in his home in Wethersfeild, Connecticut.
Whorf, Benjamin. Language, Thought and Reality - Selected Writings. 1956.
Turner, Roland. Thinkers of the 20th Century. St. James Press, 1987.
Written by Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007