Historical Background

The doctrine of radical linguistic relativity is to be understood historically as a reaction to the

denigrating attitude toward unwritten languages that was fostered by the evolutionary view prevalent

in anthropology in the nineteenth century. Subsequently, the research of Boas and his students

showed these languages to be as systematic and as logically rich as any European language, and it

was perhaps inevitable that the latter finding should spawn a doctrine on non-European languages

and cultures antithetical to the evolutionary view. If this doctrine of radical relativity has led to cer-

tain excesses of its own--in which the valid insistence on the integrity of each linguistic system has

led to an underestimation of their common structural features--we should not forget that it nonethe-

less supplied a needed corrective to the ethnocentric evolutionism it replaced. Indeed, outside of cer-

tain rarified academic milieux, the early relativists’ battle for a rational and unprejudiced view of our

nonliterate contemporaries is not yet won.