We’ve all heard it at one time or another: “the Inuit have 100 words for snow”. It’s an old classic, but one worth revisiting because it’s easy to lose track of whether it’s been debunked or rebunked. A recent paper in PNAS (Khishigsuren, Kemp & colleagues, University of Melbourne) brings the debate back into focus in an unexpected way.
The study
Researchers analysed bilingual dictionaries between English & 600+ languages, looking for “lexical elaboration”: clusters of words linked to a single concept. Crucially, they didn’t count words. They measured proportion- how much “dictionary real estate” a concept occupies. Using English definitions as anchors, they calculated elaboration scores for hundreds of concepts (from abandonment to zoo) based on how often English words appeared in the definitions of foreign entries.
This approach let them compare patterns across languages & cultures without relying on anecdote or folklore.
The findings
The analysis confirmed that Inuktitut devotes significant lexical space to snow, but it also uncovered dozens of parallel patterns: lava in Samoan, oatmeal in Scots, elephants in Sanskrit & Tamil, desert features in Arabic & Farsi.
Some elaborations map neatly onto environment; others are more enigmatic. Why does Portuguese elaborate rapture? Why does Hindi elaborate agony?
The study also highlights the limits of dictionary-based research. Dictionaries reflect the priorities of lexicographers, not everyday speakers. Some are centuries old, shaped by colonial agendas or religious translation needs. Languages with rich written traditions have sprawling dictionaries; oral languages often have compact ones.
The next step, the authors argue, is to analyse real usage -speech, social media, contemporary writing- to see which concepts genuinely dominate communication.
This work steers linguistic relativity back to respectable territory. Not the strong version (“language determines thought” idea à la Sapir‑Whorf), but a softer one: language influences what’s easy, efficient & habitual to talk about.
As the well-known linguist Lynne Murphy notes, any language can express anything; it’s just that cultures often compress frequent ideas into single words. If English speakers talked about the smell of damp clothing every day, we’d probably invent a word for it too.
Examples beyond the study help make this intuitive. Think of Japanese’s rich vocabulary for social harmony (e.g. kuuki wo yomu), or Welsh’s cluster of words around longing & place (hiraeth). Or English’s own elaboration around sport, finance & technology- areas where cultural attention has accumulated.
Teacher takeaways?
- Lexical elaboration is a reminder that vocabulary reflects lived experience. When learners struggle with “untranslatable” words, it’s often cultural density, not linguistic difficulty.
- Encourage learners to bring in examples from their own languages. It’s a powerful way to explore meaning, nuance & cultural perspective.
- When teaching vocabulary, highlight conceptual clusters. Learners often benefit from seeing how a language “packages” ideas.
What concepts do your learners’ languages elaborate- and how does that shape classroom conversations?
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