Most people see language as a vehicle for the expression of thoughts that are already
there independently of the words and grammatical structures that express them, as
seems to be implied in Saussure's model of the speech situation. But it has also been
claimed that language contributes to the shaping of thought, and that different
languages do so in different ways. This idea is often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis (or just Whorfianism), after the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee
Whorf.