Since we’re heading into the snowy part of the year, at least in North America, it seems like a good time to address a long-standing language myth: that Eskimos have a vast number of words for snow.
The idea was popularized by the now well-known amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, and especially after it made its way into popular anthropology textbooks in the 1960s and 1970s. Whorf himself wasn’t terribly specific. His number was approximately five Eskimo words for snow, but somehow the story was so compelling and romantic that it got out of control and grew bigger and bigger, like the fish that got away, with writers claiming 50, 100, and even 400 Eskimo words for snow.
This idea has been debunked multiple times by modern linguists—first by Laura Martin at Cleveland State University and then by others—but it shows up again and again in the popular press and online. Every day people tweet about Eskimos having 50, 100, and more words for snow because whether it’s true or not, it seems to be a useful cliché to emphasize that something is important to a group of people.
Eskimos have 50 words for snow, but Americans have 13 words for one type of sandwich (referring to the submarine, hoagie, hero, grinder, and so on).
Or that something should be important.
Eskimos have 100 words for snow. I wish we had 100 words for love.
The concept is so widespread that Kate Bush titled her 2011 album “50 Words for Snow,” and Glen Whitman coined the term “snowclone” to refer to phrases that fit the pattern described by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in 2003: If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have M words for Y. As in “If Eskimos have 200 words for snow, Seattleites surely have 100 words for coffee.”
The problem is that, well, there are multiple problems with the concept of Eskimos having tons of words for snow.
What Is an Eskimo, Really?
First, linguistically, Eskimos aren’t exactly one thing. The people you may think of as Eskimos live in a broad region that covers parts of Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and eastern Siberia, and they speak at least two different languages—Inuit and Yupik—and those languages have multiple dialects.
Just as we talked a few weeks ago about how English and many other languages trace back to a common language called Proto-Indo-European, Inuit and Yupik trace back to a different common language called Eskimo-Aleut. So saying Eskimos have 100 words for snow is kind of like saying Europeans have 100 words for monarchs. It might be telling you something broad about culture, but it isn’t really telling you much about language.
What Is a Word, Really?
The second problem is “What is a word?” That may seem like a picky question, but it matters because the Inuit and Yupik languages make words in different ways from how we make words in English. For example, these are what are called agglutinative languages, which sounds like the word “glue” because the words share the same Latin origin. Agglutinative languages “glue” meanings together (technically, morphemes). Agglutinative languages you might be more familiar with include Japanese and Esperanto.
Dave Wilton explained agglutination well in an Oxford Words blog post with respect to the so-called Eskimo words for snow. He wrote,
“The West Greenlandic word ‘siku,’ or ‘sea ice,’ is used as the root for ‘sikursuit,’ ‘pack ice,’ ‘sikuliaq,’ ‘new ice,’ ‘sikuaq,’ ‘thin ice,’ and ‘sikurluk,’ melting ice.’”
But it’s not that West Greenlandic has so many more words for describing snow than English, it’s just that West Greenlandic expresses ideas by gluing meaningful units of language together into one word whereas English uses more phrases and compounds. We express all the same ideas—sea ice, pack ice, new ice, thin ice, and melting ice—we just do it a little differently given the way our language is constructed.
Think of it this way. Start with a lexeme. That’s essentially a unit of meaning. It’s the word you see when you look up something in the dictionary. For example the verb “look” is a lexeme. Then you have different ways of inflecting it—different forms of the lexeme. We have a few in English. In this case, “looked,” “looking,” “looks,” and so on. But the Inuit and Yupik languages are highly inflectional. According to an article by Anthony Woodbury, a linguist at the University of Texas at Austin, one Yupik noun lexeme can have more than 280 inflectional forms.
Are you going to start with the lexeme for “snowflake” and then call every single one of those 280 inflectional forms a separate word? That doesn’t make sense, but it’s one way that people misunderstand how many words there are for “snow.”
How Many Words for Snow?
So you’re probably still wondering, “If it’s not 50 or 100 or 400 words, how many is it?” Well, Woodbury lists 15 that are present in a Yupik dictionary published in 1984, but he hedges that depending on how you look at it this is just a ballpark number. It could be 12; it could be 24. But it’s definitely not 100.
You’ll find five words for types of snow particles:
• Snowflake
• Frost
• Fine snow or rain particles
• Drifting particles
• Clinging particles
Five words for types of fallen snow:
• Fallen snow on the ground
• Soft, deep fallen snow on the ground
• Crust on fallen snow
• Fresh fallen snow
• Fallen snow floating on water
Three words for snow formations:
• Snow bank
• Snow block
• Snow cornice
Two words for meteorological events:
• Blizzard
• Severe blizzard
The ‘Language Determines Thought’ Myth
Sometimes, the “hundred words for snow” myth is used beyond a cliché and is instead used to argue that because Eskimos have so many words for snow, they conceive of snow in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine—that your language determines or limits your thoughts.
I’m aware of at least a few other arguments like this that have also been debunked. For example, multiple languages have just one word that covers both the color blue and the color green. Researchers sometimes call these “grue” languages, “grue” being a portmanteau of “green” and “blue,” but people who speak these grue languages can still distinguish between blue and green. They recognize that they’re different colors even though they are covered by one word, in the same way that we recognize that light blue and dark blue are different colors even though we’d sometimes call them both just “blue.” There are some subtle differences—people who speak languages that distinguish between green and blue find it easier to accurately pick a bluish-green color they’ve seen earlier out of a group of swatches because it’s easier to remember something you have a distinct name for—but it’s not that they are better at recognizing or conceiving the difference between blue and green.
And finally, Whorf himself also put forth an argument that the Hopi language didn’t have words for time, and therefore the Hopi people had a different concept of time from Europeans, but this also has been proven wrong.
Languages are just different. They don’t determine what we are able to think about or are not able to think about. I can think about snow floating on water even if we don’t have a specific word for that in English.
We do seem to want these snowclone-like clichés though. While I was researching Eskimo words for snow, I came across other similar ideas:
- Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea have many words for yams.
- The Hanunó'o language of the Philippines has many words for rice.
- Australians have many words for sand.
- Arabs have multiple words for camel.
So when you’re out skiing or snowboarding or sledding or just shoveling your driveway this winter, notice that the snow is heavy and wet, or light and fluffy, or mashed potatoes like my stepmom calls the snow on the ski slopes in the afternoon sun, but don’t believe the people who try to tell you that Eskimos have 100 words for snow.
Additional Sources
Pullum, Geoffrey. “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.” 1991. University of Chicago Press.
Safire, William. “On Language; Let a Simile Be Your Umbrella.” New York Times, February 11, 1996.
Trask, Robert Lawrence. “Language: The Basics.” 1999. Routledge, London and New York.
Wierzbicka, Anna. “Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish.” 1997. Oxford University Press.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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