Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited. ...

• Main Authors: Regier, Terry, Carstensen, Alexandra, Kemp, Charles
• Format: Other Non-Article Part of Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Carnegie Mellon University 2016
• Subjects: 170199 Psychology not elsewhere classified; FOS Psychology; eskimo*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1184/r1/6616913; https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/Languages_Support_Efficient_Communication_about_the_Environment_Words_for_Snow_Revisited_/6616913

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 appears to be mediated by lower communicative need to talk about snow and ice. Our results confirm that variation in semantic ...