Yeah, I love me some paraliterature, even more than I love me some pataphysics. I have a (small) collection of dictator lit (Gaddafi's short stories), Karadzic's poetry, Khomeini's poetry, one of Hoxha's memoirs (probably the best one, "With Stalin", his vaguely homoerotic account of the three times he met Stalin). There was a column in The (fucking) Guardian called, appropriately enough, "Dictator Lit", in which the columnist patted himself on the back over and again for seeing how abysmal the prose was, for being a cheerful, white liberal. The same thing happened when the BBC dug up Karadzic's poetry years and years ago, and had their Serbian translators do a rough and ready translation. Of course, they assured their readers that though it was only a rough and ready translation for news purposes, the original Serbian was just as poetically barbaric and meritless. Never mind that Karadzic was writing within a long demotic tradition of violent Serbian war poetry - The Great Satan *must* of liberal necessity be brusquely shown to have no value, no interest, and certainly no history or context, to be fundamentally artless: nothing must be salvageable or be of interest, destroy it, take it out of my sight. *We must be saved from our own uncertainty and complex guilt*. No defence of Karadzic, and not an argument for "free speech", the way the above might be twisted, but ***come on***. How self-satisfied do you have to be, as an idle consumer of state media, to read the BBC assuring you that poetry in a language you will never even consider learning is as barbaric in English (and it isn't *that* bad in English, charitably read as a rough and ready translation) as it is in its own context and **just go ahead and believe them**. What I want is a proper writer like Misha Glenny to at least give me a *report* on the work itself, not some fucking jobbing (jobby?) journo telling me "oh yes the translators all agree its awful". Fuck off. The course itself was all of that kind. It was especially egregious because I'd taken a year out after school before university, but that school had a brilliant literature dept. who taught me so much deep theory, and although sure, I didn't write my A-Level literature paper on Thomas Mann, I wrote a complicated assessment of what an "ending" is, comparing Catch-22 with Martin Amis's "Time's Arrow". But now I'm being asked to write about fuck I can’t even remember. It was dreadful. All because I went to a university in a place with a renowned education system which is, in particular, renowned because it’s especially good at producing spoon-fed hard workers who can provide a useful lower-middle-class labour army for London to trade on top of. C’est la vie en rose de Cherbourg

[Whorf's friend formulated the idea after his death.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf#Posthumous_reception_and_legacy)

The "strong" version has always been a straw man. Neither of them ever believed it. If anything it was the domain of racialist and nationalist variants Romantic philosophy, which did not separate culture, language, and race. One of the main projects of Boasian anthropology was to distinguish and separate these three concepts. Sapir was driven to debunk linguistic determinism in part because of this. (Ironically, Sapir was the most interested in individual psychology of all the Boasians despite being a target of modern psychologists.) Both of them could be said to believe in the "weak" version, but formulated as a hypothesis, it is incredibly vague. That is not entirely unwarranted, because Whorf was a scattershot writer. Neither of them ever clearly laid out any definitive "hypothesis" as it's frequently taught. This is why I only trust the primary sources and disciplinary historians at this point. This is a particularly egregious example, but misrepresentations abound.

Read the Language Instinct for an easy overview of Chomskyan linguistics, just be aware that his characterization of its critics are straw men, like everything else he writes, and the evo psych speculation is fairly unfounded. A starting point depends on what you want to look at, and if you want standard linguistics or linguistic anthropology. It's easier if you have a grasp on some of the basics of things like phonology, morphology, etc. Linguistics is not my strong suit so you are probably better off with one of the ask subs.

I don't really know their work in detail, but Currie is a sensible guy, basically.