19
votes
Northern Sámi, a language spoken in the Arctic, has more than 300 words for snow and a special word for "frightened reindeer" – can it survive in a warmer world?
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- How climate change is altering Sami language
Reading the headline, I assumed most of those 300 would be compound words, but the examples used in the article don't look like compound words (to me at least).
Yeah, this is just a restatement of the classic "Eskimo (sic) has 500 words for snow" myth. I'm sure Northern Sámi does have more words for specific types of snow than I could name in English off the top of my head (though perhaps it would be different if I were a meterologist; we do have technical terms for different types of snow, I'm told), but these types of statistics are almost always due to wildly miscounting due to not properly understanding how the relevant language works. This was absolutely the case with the "Eskimo" claim, as Inuit and Yupik are languages which use extensive suffixing to express concepts in one word that would be captured by a phrase or entire sentence in English -- thus making almost every concept extensible into almost infinite words, because their structure is just different than English's.
To my knowledge, Northern Sámi doesn't have "sentence words" like Inuit does. However, the Sámi languages are Finnic (and thus related, perhaps unsurprisingly, to Finnish) and thus have a pretty large case system marked by suffixes. Northern Sámi has 7 cases, 6 of which have different forms in the singular and the plural. If one is ignorant to this fact, one could count a single word multiple times -- for instance, the word "sápmẹlaš" (which means "Sámi person" and has its declension listed on wikipedia) has 10 different forms depending on case and number. It's even worse for verbs (which could well be counted as separate "words for snow" -- "to snow" is a verb in English after all) -- by my count, verbs can have almost 50 different forms based on the tense/mood as well as the number and person of the subject.
In any case, the article provides too few examples for me to do anything but conclude they counted incorrectly, especially given the suspicious similarity to a pervasive myth about a different indigenous people living in the Arctic Circle. The citation for this number is to a book that I can't access without an academic login, so I can't check to see if it makes this claim or if the author of the BBC's article just made it up.
I skimmed through the paper linked below (actually a PhD thesis), and it seems like an important nuance was lost. This was a study of the specialist terminology used by reindeer herders. It does appear that North Sámi has a larger amount of distinct snow-related root words than are commonly used in English. But at the same time, many of the terms are related to the interplay between snow and reindeer herding, and are terms which may not be familiar to speakers who aren't reindeer herders (which at present is the majority of speakers).
For instance, the thesis goes into some detail about the concept of guohtun, which is a generic concept defined as "People usually use the concept guohtun to estimate how easily the reindeer is able to
dig through the snow to the ground below where the food is to be found." There are then numerous specific variants of gouhtun, from simple adjective combinations like good or bad gouhtun to more colorful examples like "nose" gouhtun (the reindeer easily digs through the snow to access vegetation with only their nose), or gouhtun where the reindeer is only able to dig through the snow in select patches on the ground.
There's a tendency to exoticize indigenous cultures. We can marvel at their highly sophisticated understanding of the interplay between their livelihood and their environment without making them seem almost alien, which is dehumanizing. In this case, there's an impressive variety and specificity of language, much of which is specific to a certain profession. It seems like you could make a similar statement like "computer scientists have over 300 concepts related to computer memory". That's the kind of thing we're dealing with: highly specialized language used by experts in a particular profession. Although it does seem that the everyday vocabulary is also at least somewhat richer than that of English.
But what of English speakers in, say, rural Alaska? I'm not sure there's been any comparable studies done on the snow vocabulary and jargon of non-native cultures. I did find an informally compiled list of some 400 Norwegian words related to snow and ice. Granted, many of them are compounds with "snø", the generic word for snow, and many others are ones I, as a native speaker, have never heard, presumably dialectal or archaic words. But they still display an impressive amount of nuance and care in describing weather conditions that are relevant to the region.
That's from the 2022 paper by Eira linked in the article. It specifically uses the term concepts and not "words", which leans more towards adjective use of sorts, rather than having distinct words.
The BBC article interprets this as though they are distinct words, which isn't claimed in the paper (reflecting the usual quality of the BBC's reporting).
Following the references we find Eira 2012:
The Silent Language of Snow Sámi traditional knowledge of snow in times of climate change (pdf)
Appendix 1, starting on page 173 in the pdf, lists the 318 concepts, but the descriptions are in Sámi which I do not understand.
Ahhhh that makes much more sense, thanks for looking up the original!