Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyon Fogarty, and today I'm talking with Charles Kemp,

Professor of the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

This was such an interesting discussion about something that people in the Northern Hemisphere

are seeing a lot of right now.

Snow. You've likely heard that Inuit languages have dozens or even hundreds of words for snow.

It's a fun fact that pops up in headlines and coffee shop conversations, but is it actually true?

Or is it, as one linguist famously called it, the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax?

Well, Professor Kemp has been using big data to find out, not just for snow, but for how our

environment shapes the very way we speak. When we first sat down to talk, he told me that he's

always been fascinated by the

Nether Conklin principle.

The idea that the more important something is to a culture, the more words they'll have

to describe it.

He pointed to two specific words that illustrate just how specialized language can get.

Well, I could mention a couple that's stuck in my mind.

There's a central Alaska Newpick dictionary, which has a word.

I think it is a trugta, and it's powdery snow that enters through cracks in a house.

So snow where it isn't meant to be.

Another one I remember is a word, an inuktu word, it is kikalupok, and it means noisy walking on hard snow.

So the concept of that just intrigued me.

But Charles says that counting these words is harder than it looks.

Many of these languages are polysynthetic, meaning a single word can represent an entire English sentence like snow that's

...