It’s an old adage, that the Inuit language has over fifty words for snow.

And yet, this popular misconception is not too far from the truth.

That’s because, as researchers from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the University of California, Berkeley, found out in a recent collaborative study.

In fact, the interdisciplinary research team found out that many languages reflect their culture in profound and often hilarious ways.

Their computational linguistic analysis, which was recently published in the journal Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, reveals that the particular lexemes (words; the singular would be lexis) used in a language, and their frequency and number of synonyms, tend to be particularly telling about the culture in which speakers of that language share.

And this makes sense, because even in the early days of a particular language, its speakers would have required more of the same kind of word to describe a particular thing of interest, in many different and differentiating ways.

To analyse the languages – of which the project encompassed 616 – the researchers created a dataset derived from 1574 bilingual dictionaries. They then explored the synonym frequencies in the languages, and were dazzled by how they reflected cultures, as the team explained in an article for The Conversation:

“One example of a concept we looked at was ‘horse’, for which the top-scoring languages included French, German, Kazakh and Mongolian. This means dictionaries in these languages had a relatively high number of words for horses.”

The premise of their research, understanding the extent to which language and culture are intertwined, seemed immediately to have been proven.

Of course, the team turned their attention to one of the boldest linguistic claims of all time: did Inuit languages really have over fifty words for snow?

The results, as the team continued, caught them by surprise:

“Our results suggest the Inuit snow vocabulary is indeed exceptional. Out of 616 languages, the language with the top score for ‘snow’ was Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. The other two Inuit languages in our data set (Western Canadian Inuktitut and North Alaskan Inupiatun) also achieved high scores for ‘snow’.

The Eastern Canadian Inuktitut dictionary in our dataset includes terms such as kikalukpok, which means ‘noisy walking on hard snow’, and apingaut, which means ‘first snow fall’.”

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Though the researchers agree that there is good reason for the prolific use of synonyms for some concepts in particular languages, they urge caution.

Don’t use our fascinating dataset for stereotyping, they urge. Language is beautiful and ever-changing, and individuals and cultures cannot be understood merely at this face-value level.

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