No doubt you’ve heard someone claim, “Eskimo has hundreds of words for snow”. This is one of our classic urban legends.
Apparently, it started in 1911 with anthropologist Franz Boas mentioning that the Inuit – whom he called “Eskimos”, (nowadays considered a derogatory term) – has four different words for snow. Others hold that this steady growth of exaggeration started with Whorf’s much-quoted 1940 article that places the word-count to 7 ( 1). Gradually, as this story was told and retold, spreading around the world in an unstoppable Chinese whispers phenomenon, the number sometimes reached as many as 400 words. Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct ( 2), explains that “Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English” and “counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen.”
When researching on the subject, it is rather mind boggling because even just getting down to understanding the problem is complex, since there are so many versions of it, and many contradictions. Anyway, let’s try!
The traditional claim is “Eskimos have N words for snow” (for growing N) — and every part of that claim is problematic:
- There is no single “Eskimo” language, just like there is no single “Indian” language. In fact “Indian” and “Eskimo” are not the best names since they gather several major cultural groups, ignoring considerable differences between them, notably huge language variations, within each distinct group.
- How do we count words? And what is a word anyway? We could discuss these two questions forever so I’ll just leave them hanging for now…
- What qualifies a word as being “for snow”? Does it mean that it has the same applications as English does for snow? Surely not, otherwise Eskimo wouldn’t have any words for snow at all. What about the fuzz on a TV screen? That type of snow refers solely to the context of poor audiovisual reception. How wide or narrow are the boundaries and how can we ensure that we’re setting them the same in the languages that are being compared?

Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput ‘snow on the ground’, gana ‘falling snow’, piqsirpoq ‘drifting snow’, and qimuqsuq ‘a snow drift’. In English, there are derived terms for various forms of water (liquid, lake, river, sea, ocean, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam, sweat, pond, puddle, drizzle, and so on). In another language, these terms could all stem from derivational morphology (suffixes etc) from a single root meaning “water”. This could be one reason explaining why some claimed that Eskimo had hundreds of words for snow: derivational morphology. Inuit and Aleut are agglutinative languages: they assemble large words out of many parts whereas English tends to use multiple words instead (the short and sweet version?). This pattern has nothing to do with snow; it’s just how English, Inuit and Aleut differ in general.
Let me illustrate this last point with another example: igluqsaq. This is a compound word that means ‘house-building material’, (as you undoubtedly noticed with the familiar ‘iglu’ at the beginning). However, it can mean wood, brick, or any other material to build houses with; not necessarily only snow. We could try pulling the same trick in English by counting words like “etiology”, (slipping on snow can cause injuries), “projectile”, (snowballs can be thrown), “food”, (snow can be eaten), and so on and so forth. Once again, all depends on context, geographically, syntactically and grammatically.
Also, when thinking about it, people who live in snowy lands might not even care about the variations between types of snow. Similarly, few people care about the different types of grass or pavements in our parts of the world. Such constant elements usually disappear into the background and become less interesting.
Linguists such as Pinker and Pullum ( 3) to name just two, have nowadays successfully debunked the myth. But what strikes me as interesting is why do people still cling to it? Why do they need to count, classify and draw boundaries to pretend things are simpler and clearer than they actually are? Good question, batman!

Notes:
(1)Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. “Science and Linguistics” In Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge: MIT Press.(retour au texte1)

(2)Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language, HarperCollins, 576 pages.(retour au texte2)

(3)Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1991. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. University of Chicago Press.(retour au texte3)