Do Eskimos really have 400 words for snow?

Fact or myth?

The claim that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for “snow” was first loosely attributed to the work of anthropologist Franz Boas. It was then promoted by Benjamin Lee Whorf and became a flagship example to support his controversial linguistic-relativity hypothesis (also known as “Whorfianism”). This hypothesis posits that a language’s vocabulary (among other features) shapes its speakers’ view of the world.

Nowadays, this claim is considered a cliché, mainly among American linguists, who insist that this is due to a misunderstanding related to a wrong analysis of the structure of these languages.

The Inuit (Eskimo) languages are called polysynthetic languages. This means that the carrier of meaning is a much smaller unit compared to the European languages. New concepts that in many other languages are expressed through compound words, phrases or even whole sentences are created by adding suffixes to the root (core) words. In the Inuit languages, a virtually unlimited number of new words can be created for any topic, although other languages would use word combinations to express the same concepts. Comparing the number of words between different languages therefore loses its meaning when the languages juxtaposed operate different grammatical structures.

If we compare West Greenlandic with English, we can see that “siku”, or “sea ice”, is the root for: “sikursuit” (“pack ice”), “sikuliaq” (“new ice”), “sikuaq” (“thin ice”), and “sikurluk” (“melting ice”).

So all this fuss about the Inuit languages is due to a lack of reliable knowledge?

It turns out that not really. It is known that the Inuit languages do not have one general word for snow, but they automatically distinguish between “qaniɣ” (“falling snow”), “aniɣu” (“fallen snow”), and “apun” (“snow on the ground”). Except for West Greenlandic, which has no “aniɣu”. It is a bit like with words such as “spring”, “lake” or “pond”, which are all associated with water while not directly derived from the word.

Snow, in various forms, is an everyday reality for the people of the far North, so it is not surprising that the expressive repertoire in this area is richer and more extensive. Usually, when something plays a central role in the life of a community it is directly reflected in the language they use. Another example, analogous to Eskimos, comes from the Bedouin, who have an extremely extensive vocabulary to describe sand.