It is quite challenging to give a precise number of words that are used in place of “snow” by the Northern people. It is because we are dealing with a large group of people who have different languages due to variations in their native places. Most of the people do not consider any of the common languages. Eskimos have more than a dozen distinct words for snow.
Know more about the Eskimos’ words for ‘snow’
However, it is a myth that Eskimos have multiple numbers of names for snow. You must have read somewhere that “if the Eskimos (Inuit) have 50 words for ‘snow’ then Britons surely have 50 words for ‘bus service’, or for something else maybe. The trope is quite common, and it has even got a name, i.e., ‘Snowclone,’ which is entirely false.
In 1986, Laura Martin traced the origin of the claim made by Franz Boas that Eskimos have n number of words for snow. Boas mentioned in 1911 that there are four lexically unrelated words for snow, which are not further distinguished.
In the 1940s, a man called Benjamin Whorf claimed that as Eskimos have many words for snow, then they might have been capable of thining of snow in ways that none can. He took the four examples of Boas “aput: ’s now on the ground’, Qana: ‘falling snow,’ piqsirpoq: ‘drifting snow,’ and qimuqsuq: ‘a snowdrift’ and wrote his claims in the Technology Review article called “Science and linguistics.”
Fun facts:
- There isn’t just one Inuit language
There are two more extensive parts of Eskimo-Aleut language family one is the Yupik language, which is commonly spoken in far-eastern Russia and few parts of Alaska. On the other hand, there is the Inuit language which is mainly spoken in Canada and Greenland. And thus, it is right to say that there are no 200 words for snow. Linguists that fall in the “few words” are in a vast majority, and there is nothing special or significant about the number of words for snow in these languages.
- Most of the confusion arises because we don’t understand what we mean by the word “word”
The Eskimo-Aleut languages are mostly the “agglutinative language,” which means that they construct complex words, out of simple words. Also, Hungarian and Turkish people do the same thing. It is not that they have a large number of words for snow, the only thing is that they say “packedsnow” for the word “packed snow” and “wetsnow” for the word “wet snow.”
- Eskimos words for each word
Eskimo languages don’t have 100 words for snow only but also have tons of words for every other word. They use n number of words for coffee, grass, music, snow, and every other single word in the dictionary. The myth is very much tricky to kill as there is a vast number of words, but all of them are either complex or meaningless. Hence, the conclusion is that more or less, it is a myth!