> different people, living in different places, speaking different languages, will have a different experience of the world. This is not the same thing as the

> different people, living in different places, speaking different languages, will have a different experience of the world. This is not the same thing as the hypothesis. You're saying that language is going to be correlated with world knowledge, but that both are a result of the environment that those people are living in. Environment -> Language, and Environment -> Perception. This shared causal relationship induces correlation between Language and Perception, but does not conclude any specific causal relation between those two. Sapir-Whorf hypothesises Language -> Perception. This is a meaningful additional causal relationship, which is very hard (but perhaps not strictly impossible if you don't care about ethics) to find evidence for. The cited weaker version still suggests the same causal Language -> Perception relationship, but allows the influence to be weaker in some way.