Eskimo words for snow Alaskan Inuit in their winter home, half underground in the village of Stebbins, Alaska, 1900 The claim that Eskimo words for snow are unusually numerous, particularly in contrast to English, is a cliché commonly used to support the controversial linguistic relativity hypothesis. In linguistic terminology, the relevant languages are the Eskaleut languages, specifically the Yupik and Inuit varieties. The strongest interpretation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis posits that a language's vocabulary (among other features) shapes or limits its speakers' view of the world. This interpretation is widely criticized by linguists, though a 2010 study supports the core notion that the Yupik and Inuit languages have many more root words for frozen variants of water than the English language. The original claim is loosely based in the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and was particularly promoted by his contemporary, Benjamin Lee Whorf. The idea is commonly tied to larger discussions on the connections between language and thought. ## Overview Franz Boas did not make quantitative claims but rather pointed out that the Eskaleut languages have about the same num

Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited | PLOS One Browse Subject Areas ? Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here. - Reader Comments - Figures ## Figures ## Abstract The claim that Eskimo languages have words for different types of snow is well-known among the public, but has been greatly exaggerated through popularization and is therefore viewed with skepticism by many scholars of language. Despite the prominence of this claim, to our knowledge the line of reasoning behind it has not been tested broadly across languages. Here, we note that this reasoning is a special case of the more general view that language is shaped by the need for efficient communication, and we empirically test a variant of it against multiple sources of data, including library reference works, Twitter, and large digital collections of linguistic and meteorological data. Consistent with the hypothesis of efficient communication, we find that languages that use the same linguistic form for snow and ice tend to be spoken in warmer climates, and that this association appear