Do the Eskimos have many more words for ‘snow’ than the rest of us, and does this question matter? As we approach the full blast of winter, now would seem a good time to lay this old chestnut to bed for good.

The person we have to thank for setting this debate in motion is one of the founding fathers of social anthropology, the German-American Franz Boas (1858-1942). In his landmark work The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Boas mentioned in passing that ‘in Eskimo’, we find:

One word expressing ‘snow on the ground’; another one, ‘falling snow’; a third one, ‘drifting snow’; a fourth one, ‘a snowdrift’.

All quite unremarkable, one would presume. In the previous paragraph he had mentioned that in English we likewise have many words to describe fluid water, such as lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave and ‘foam’.

The legend’s allure spread on the presumption that the Eskimos were otherworldly

Although Boas placed no great importance upon language in his study of mankind – ‘it happens that each language, from the point of view of another language, may be arbitrary in its classifications’ – he did regard culture as pre-eminent in determining how we perceive, comprehend and mentally order the world around us. He called this the ‘cultural glasses’ (Kulturbrille) we all wear.

Yet it was unfortunate that as the 20th century unfolded, there emerged a consensus in philosophy and anthropology that words were supremely important, not only in helping to shape and determine thought, but in literally articulating the uniqueness of all cultures. Two of Boas’s most influential disciples, Edmund Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, were of this school, and they conducted extensive research among the Native American peoples of North American in the early- and mid-20th century. Whorf concluded that language:

Is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but is itself the shaper of ideas… We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.

While the idea that language actually facilitates thought would reach its apex at the height of postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, Whorf wrote an article in 1940 entitled ‘Science and linguistics’, taking its cue from Boas to push his belief in linguistic determinism. Here he increased the tally of terms for the white stuff from four to seven, concluding:

We [English speakers] have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow hard packed like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable…

That word ‘unthinkable’ was critical. It conveyed the notion that Eskimos (of whom the Inuit make up one subset – the more modern, politically correct term is inaccurate) were in possession of a language so exotic and unique as to be almost unknowable to English-speakers. Wharf’s article not only helped cement a conceit in learned circles that the language we speak largely determines the way we think, but it launched the Eskimo snow myth in earnest. His article was reprinted widely, cited in textbooks and popular books, with his figure subject to numerical exaggeration with each retelling. Soon seven words for snow had become fifty. By 1984, The New York Times would publish an editorial claiming that the Inuit had 100 synonyms for it. It still remains a resilient urban myth.

Yet the myth was hokum. Boas was about right the first time round. As J. P. Davidson wrote in his 2011 work Planet Word, which critiques Sapir and Whorf’s theory of language and thought:

In fact, English and Eskimo have about the same number of root words for snow – think: ‘snow’, ‘blizzard’, ‘sleet’, ‘slush’, ‘hail’, and ‘flurry’.

To this list one might add ‘avalanche’, ‘powder’, ‘dusting’.

So how did this legend come to pass as fact? A 20th-century obsession with language and its supposed omnipotence certainly played its part. The myth also perhaps made some crude appeal to common sense, resting on the notion that if you are a people surrounded by nothing but frozen water all day, then you are bound to invent different terms for it. But a far older Western foible was also at play: romantic primitivism, which by the 20th century had metamorphosed into a paternal fascination with ‘indigenous peoples’.

The legend’s allure spread on the presumption that the Eskimos were otherworldly. Writing on the topic in The Language Instinct (1994), Steve Pinker concluded that:

The supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronising willingness to treat other cultures’ psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own.

Geoffrey Pullman, in his 1991 essay ‘The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax’ remarked that even if this people did have many words for frozen water, it would be utterly unremarkable, given that horse breeders have many names for breeds, interior decorators have multiple names for shades of mauve and printers a plethora of terms for fonts.

The irony of it all is that it had been Franz Boas’s mission to show that there was no substantial, qualitative difference between ‘civilised man’ and ‘primitive man’. Each merely had different ways of viewing their environment and ordering their world mentally according to their culture and needs. None was more advanced than the other. Yet his innocuous observations on arbitrary linguistic categories set off a chain reaction that resulted in an indigenous people being once more exotically othered as alien and incomprehensible.

But now for the post-script: according to results published this April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, a computational psychologist showed that the Inuit do indeed have more words for frozen water. Much in the same way, the Samoans have many words for lava and the Scots a plethora of terms for oatmeal. This latest claim would support an empirical, common-sense approach to the matter, that languages do indeed reflect our environment.

So in answer to the original question: the Eskimos probably have just as many words for snow as we do – and perhaps a few more. What’s certainly untrue is that they have vastly more. Does it matter? Only if you believe that the language we speak reflects and affects who we are.