Linguistic relativism as a philosophical-linguistic view argues that the structure and vocabulary of a language affects the thinking and understanding of the world of its speakers in one way or another. The famous sentence, that philosophers from the Uralic language family (this includes the Finno-Ugric languages) most likely would look ‘into the world’ differently and can be encountered on other paths of thought than Indo-Germans, originates from Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the well-known representatives of this view. Uku Masing, one of the few Finno-Ugric linguistic relativists, focuses in detail on the question of what the main attributes of Finno-Ugric linguistic reality are and what distinguishes it from Indo-European interpretations of the world, thereat also referring to Nietzsche’s work Beyond Good and Evil. This article first studies the history of the genesis of linguistic relativism as a philosophical position, and thereafter focuses on analysing the linguistic relativism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Uku Masing, more closely examining what according to them characterises and differentiates Indo-European and Finno-Ugric understandings of the world, and which grammatical peculiarities each of them are conditioned by, thereat highlighting at the same time extensive overlaps in their thinking. Finally, the article places the treatments of both Nietzsche and Masing in a somewhat broader context of 20th century philosophy.