No one would disagree with the claim that language and thought interact in many significant ways. Different theorists have tried to explain this situation in different ways.
The linguistic relativity principle is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.

Relativity is easy to demonstrate. In order to speak any language, you have to pay attention to the meanings that are grammatically marked in that language. Proponents of linguistic determinism argue that such differences between languages influence the ways people think—perhaps the ways in which whole cultures are organized.

Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the principle is often defined to include two versions: the strong hypothesis and the weak hypothesis: the strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.

According to Edward Sapir, “no two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality; the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached”. Then, Benjamin Lee Whorf concluded that differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers perceived the world.

But, before Sapir and Whorf, the German scientist Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820: “The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world”. According to him, languages with an inflectional morphological type, such as German, English and the other Indo-European languages were the most perfect languages and this explained the dominance of their speakers over the speakers of less perfect languages.

In contrast to Humboldt, Franz Boas stressed the equal worth of all cultures and languages, and argued that there was no such thing as primitive languages, but that all languages were capable of expressing the same content albeit by widely differing means.

Linguistic relativity has been abandoned and criticized over the decades, with critics aiming to show that perception and cognition are universal, not tied to language and culture. But some psychologists and anthropologists continue to argue that differences in a language's structure and words may play a role in determining how we think. Experiments on how color terms influence color perception and how speakers of different languages approach non-linguistic tasks continue to spark debate.