Sapir-Whorf redux
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In "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25), I summarized and assessed the following paper:
Temuulen Khishigsuren et al, "A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417304122
My post was picked up by Cody Cottier, who was doing a critique of the Khishigsuren et al. article for Scientific American. Cottier interviewed me and incorporated some of what I said to him in this review:
Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’
Inuit languages really do have many words for snow, linguists found—and other languages have conceptual specialties, too, potentially revealing what a culture values
Scientific American (5/9/25)
Cottier begins his article thus:
In 1884 the anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would kick off decades of linguistic wrangling: by his count, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, suggesting a link between language and physical environment. A great game of telephone inflated the number until, in 1984, the New York Times published an editorial claiming the Inuit have “100 synonyms” for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term.
Then, as we at Language Log know all too well, our colleague Geoff Pullum published "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" in 1991, which muted the billowing claims for a generation, but, as Cottier quotes me, “it’s coming back in a legitimate way.” Fair enough, and here is why:
In a sweeping new computational analysis of world languages, researchers not only confirmed the emphasis on snow in the Inuit language Inuktitut but also uncovered many similar patterns: what snow is to the Inuit, lava is to Samoans and oatmeal to Scots. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in April. Charles Kemp, a computational psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and senior author of the study, says the results offer a window onto language speakers’ culture. “It’s a way to get a sense of the ‘chief interests of a people’—what’s important to a society, what they prioritize and value,” he says, quoting Boas.
I will not repeat the methods and findings of the original PNAS paper and my Language Log post summarizing and assessing it, but will only point to three striking maps in the Scientific American article that illustrate the researchers' claim that their analysis of different themes across dictionaries of more than 600 languages that show which ones have the highest estimated proportion of references to certain concepts, in this case for "snow", "smell", and "dance", together with associated words that show the same general distribution (e.g., for "smell", "suck, rotten, ripe, pull, rub, food, climb, wet, dry, tree, nose".
Many Oceanic languages … have highly specific words for smell. In Marshallese, meļļā means “smell of blood” and jatbo means “smell of damp clothing.” This may be explained by the humidity of the rainforest, which amplifies scents.
Turning more directly to Sapir-Whorf,
Mair says this research, which he highlighted on the popular linguistics blog Language Log, helps resurrect the much-maligned idea of linguistic relativity, sometimes known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. At its boldest, linguistic relativity asserts that language determines how we perceive things, causing speakers of different languages to experience the world in radically different ways (think of the movie Arrival, in which a character becomes clairvoyant after learning an alien language). But in Mair’s opinion, this study supports a softer claim: our brains all share the same basic machinery for perceiving the world, which language can subtly affect but not restrict. “It doesn’t determine,” he says. “It influences.”
Similarly, Lynne Murphy, a linguist at the University of Sussex in England, who was not involved in this study, notes that “any language should be able to talk about anything.” We may not have the Marshallese word jatbo, but four words of English do the trick—“smell of damp clothing.” It’s not that having many precise words for smell reveals mind-blowing cognitive abilities for processing smell; it’s simply that single words are more efficient than phrases, so they tend to represent common subjects of discussion, highlighting areas of cultural significance. If we routinely needed to talk about the smell of damp clothing, we’d whittle that unwieldy phrase down to something like jatbo.
Cottier ends his article with reservations about the limitations of lexical elaboration expressed by Murphy and Khishigsuren. Thus, while the door to Sapir-Whorfianisam has been reopened by a slight crack, it remains as it should be, one of linguistic relativity.
Selected readings
- Charles Kemp, Lexical Elaboration Explorer (html)
- John A. Lucy, "Linguistic relativity" (pdf)
[h.t. Hiroshi Kumamoto and Ben Zimmer]