An influential form of descriptive cultural relativism owes its genesis to linguistics. Benjamin Whorf, inspired by his teacher Edward Sapir, who in turn was supervised by the social anthropologist Franz Boas, used ethnographic evidence from American Indian languages, such as Hopi, to argue that languages mold our views of the world and different languages do so differently, because “we dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages” (Whorf 1956: 213). In the case of the Hopi, the claim was that their language imposes a conception of time very different from that of the speakers of the Indo-European languages. The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the position known as “linguistic relativity”, became popular in both psychology and social anthropology in the mid 20th century. However, the empirical work by the psychologists Berlin and Key (1969) and later by Eleanor Rosch (1974) pointed to the universality of color terms. The linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky regarding the universality of grammar were also widely taken to have discredited linguistic relativity. Moreover, Malotki (1983) had argued that, contrary to Whorf’s claim, the Hopi language does indeed have tense, as well as units of time, such as days, weeks, months and seasons, and terminology for yesterday and tomorrow. Things have changed recently and there has been a slight swing of the pendulum back in favor of linguistic relativity on the part of so called “neo-Whorfians”. Stephen Levinson, for instance, drawing on experimental evidence, has argued that the frame of reference that underlies any given language shapes our spatial experiences and perceptual modalities (see Gumperz &amp; Levinson 1996). Similar claims have been made about emotions, object representation, and memory. But the claims of linguistic relativity in all these cases are much more modest than Whorf’s original thesis.