A now discredited theory of language which holds that linguistic competence determines cognitive capacity. Developed by American linguist Edmund Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf, using a study of Native American languages as its baseline, this theory holds that the relative complexity of a language---what it is able to say---determines the limit of what those language speakers are able to know. Moreover, each language is born of a different world-view, so it is impossible for speakers from different language groups to ever properly come to know one another. In effect it makes an absolute of the idea of cultural relativism widely embraced by both Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies.