Edward Sapir (1884-1939) is one of the most renowned American linguists and anthropologists of his time. He is best known for his work on North American Indian languages. An influential founder of ethnolinguistics, he was also a leading developer of the American school of structural linguistics.
Sapir was born in German Pomerania, now northern Poland. The family emigrated to the United States when he was a child. He attended Columbia University, where he studied Germanic linguistics under the influence of Franz Boas. Sapir emphasized language study in his college years at Columbia, studying Latin, Greek, and French for eight semesters. He found that this knowledge helped him in his later career as a linguist. From his sophomore year, he began to focus on Germanic languages, completing coursework in Gothic, Old High German, Old Saxon, Icelandic, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish.
Through Germanic professor William Carpenter, Sapir was exposed to methods of comparative linguistics that were being developed into a more scientific field than the traditional philological approach. He also took courses in Sanskrit and music, and complemented his language studies by studying Edward MacDowell in the department of famous composers.
Sapir enrolled in Professor Livingston Farrand’s course “Introduction to Anthropology” last year. Farrand’s course emphasizes the Boas “four field” approach to anthropology. He also enrolled in an advanced anthropology seminar taught by Franz Boas, who would completely change the direction of his career. This led him to focus on Native American languages. For about six years, he studied the languages of indigenous people living in the western United States. One of his most important monographs was on cultural change among American Indians (1916). He also devoted his attention to the Indian languages west of the continental divide.
In the 1910s and 1920s, Sapir established and directed the Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. When he was hired, he was one of the first anthropologists in Canada to be full-time. Sapir’s time in Canada allowed him to emerge as the leading figure in linguistics in North America.
One of his most significant works from this time period was his book on time perspective in Native American cultures, in which he outlined an approach to using historical linguistics to study prehistory among these cultures. For establishing himself as a leading linguist, Edward Sapir wrote the seminal book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech in 1921. This book was aimed at a non-specialist audience, and it provided a basic understanding of linguistics as Sapir envisioned it. He also participated in the formulation of a report to the American Anthropological Association on the standardization of orthographic principles for writing Indigenous languages.
After moving to Chicago, Sapir became a professor at the University of Chicago in 1925 and suggested that the vast number of Indian languages spoken in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America can be classified into six major divisions.
In 1931, he was appointed a professor at Yale University, where he established the department of anthropology. He remained active in this field until just two years before his death, where he served as the head of the Department of Anthropology. During his tenure, Sapir made significant contributions to the field of anthropology, and his teachings have had a lasting impact on the discipline.
He was invited to Yale to start an interdisciplinary program combining anthropology, linguistics and psychology aimed at studying “the influence of culture on personality”. However, Sapir had problems with his heart condition in the summer of 1937 while teaching at the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in Ann Arbor, and the program never gained momentum.