How a Modest Note About Snow Became a Hoax

In 1911 the anthropologist Franz Boas, describing the languages of the Arctic in a handbook, noted in passing that the Inuit of Baffin Island used several different roots for snow. He gave four, among them one for snow on the ground and one for snow in the act of falling. It was a modest observation, made to show how languages divide up experience.

The observation did not stay modest. In 1940 the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, in a widely read essay, used the example to argue that speakers of different languages inhabit different worlds. Later writers enlarged the list with each retelling, and popular accounts have offered figures running from dozens to several hundred. Magazines and advertisements adopted the claim, and it became one of the most repeated facts about language that nobody had checked.

The linguist Geoffrey Pullum called the pattern "the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" in an essay that is still widely read. His argument was that the story spread because it was charming, not because anyone had examined the languages concerned. The first difficulty is what counts as a word. Inuit and Yupik languages build long words by attaching endings to a root, so a single word can carry what English needs a whole sentence to say. A language that builds words from parts has no fixed count of words for anything.

A language that builds words from parts has no fixed count of words for anything.

The second difficulty is that English is not as poor in snow words as the story assumes. Speakers have sleet, slush, flurry, blizzard, powder and drift, and skiers and meteorologists add many more. Communities that live with snow talk about it with fine precision, just as sailors speak precisely about rope and cooks about heat. Vocabulary follows interest, which is hardly a mystery.

Defenders of a weaker version of Whorf's idea reply that the point was never about snow. They note experiments suggesting that vocabulary can nudge perception at the margins. A study reported in 2007 found that Russian speakers, whose language has separate basic words for lighter and darker blues, were quicker to tell apart shades that fell on opposite sides of that boundary. The effect was small, and it appeared to fade when participants were asked to hold a string of digits in mind at the same time.

So the strong claim, that language fixes what a mind can think, looks fragile, while a weak claim survives. Between the two lies a wide territory that no experiment has mapped. The hoax lasted perhaps because it flatters a belief that cannot be tested from inside any one language, the belief that somewhere another people see a world that the speaker's own words have hidden.