In our last article, we explored how the oft-repeated claim that “Eskimos have 50 words for snow” has long been used to illustrate the idea that language shapes thought. This is a theory known as linguistic relativity, or more formally, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But as linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum argued in his essay The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, the claim does not hold up to scrutiny. While Inuit and Yupik languages do have multiple terms related to snow, the number of distinct word roots is not significantly greater than in English. After all, we have snow, sleet, powder, slush, flurry, blizzard, drift and more, especially when domain-specific language is considered.

Pullum traced the myth to a misreading of Franz Boas, an anthropologist from the early 20th century. He made observations about linguistic structure in Inuit languages that were later expanded and distorted by Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf used the snow vocabulary claim to support the broader Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that language does not just reflect reality but shapes it. Over time, the example entered public discourse as a kind of linguistic soundbite.

The Myth Became a Meme

The enduring popularity of the “50 words for snow” myth has little to do with its accuracy. It has become a meme, a culturally repeated idea or phrase that replicates because it sticks, rather than because it is true. It feels true. It’s compact, captures the imagination and easy to repeat. Even when people know it has been debunked, the meme persists as a metaphor.

In 2004, Pullum coined the term “snowclone” to describe this kind of linguistic meme, i.e. a phrasal template that can be adapted to new contexts. The classic snowclone is “If the Inuit have N words for snow, then X must have Y words for Z”, along the lines of the following:

·       If the Inuit have 50 words for snow, then Instagram must have 50 filters for sunset.

·       If New Yorkers have 50 words for pizza, then Parisians must have 100 for bread.

Snowclones work because of their template-like structure. They are instantly familiar and easy to customise. Another well-known example of a snowclone is “X is the new Y” formula, which has produced cultural catchphrases such as “Orange is the new black”, “50 is the new 40”, “Sitting is the new smoking”. Both structures operate in the same way: they survive not because they are profound, but because they are catchy and they feel true.

Language shapes thought not in rigid, deterministic ways, but through metaphors and mental shortcuts that we repeatedly reach for.

The “50 words…” meme is so pervasive that it has long been entrenched in pop culture. Kate Bush titled her 2011 album 50 Words for Snow, which was a poetic exploration of winter. But Kate is beyond reproach anyway and I grant her license to draw on linguistic myth, on account of her genius. In fact, the album title itself shows that the phrase now functions more as a cultural metaphor than linguistic fact.

Why It Won’t Go Away

This myth still circulates in education, academia and journalism. I heard British journalist Emily Maitlis say it in the News Agents podcast in February 2025:

“The Eskimos of Nunavut famously have 50 words for snow. Brits have around 188 words for rain and right now we are learning the myriad ways that our leaders have of telling Donald Trump he is wrong.”

The lazy metaphors cheapen the point Emily was trying to make.

This myth persists for a number of reasons. First, many people do not know that it has been debunked. It is used repeatedly without question, including in conference settings, which should be precisely the right place for critical interrogation, rather than agreeing, nodding heads. The correct statement, that Inuit languages use compounding and contextual descriptors like many other agglutinative languages (like Turkish or Finnish), simply lacks the punch and portability of the myth.

Secondly, the phrase has become useful shorthand. It evokes the broader and mostly valid idea that language and culture are interwoven. But the problem isn’t the concept, it is the oversimplification. It offers an easy-to-grasp illustration of a complex idea. And it comes at the cost of accuracy.

Thirdly, it taps into a form of cultural exoticism. It feeds into a Western tendency of romanticising and mythologising Indigenous cultures, through distorted readings. It does not reflect the objective truth.

Time to Let it Melt

The “50 words” myth risks misleading people into thinking that lexical quantity is what really counts. Language is more than just a word count. It is a system of relationships, metaphors and cultural knowledge. This is what we need to tap into when approaching cross-cultural translations of patient-facing documents. Just because one language has a word for a concept does not mean another cannot express it. It might do so via description, metaphor, compound formation, domain-specific jargon and simply by borrowing the word from another language.

The “50 words” myth may be too entrenched to disappear completely, but we should not give it credence, especially in professional settings, like in the conference described in the previous article. It does not prove anything about how language works. It distracts from going into richer terrain, lying just under the surface, such as spatial orientation, grammatical gender and object perception, evidentiality, perception of colour and time. These are far more fertile – and real – examples of how language can shape perception.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, May 2025