Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology. Asifa Majid. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, December 18 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.11.005
Highlights
* The human sense of smell is far more acute than previously thought, yet it is still commonly believed that there is no language of smell.
* In English there are, indeed, few words for smell qualities, smell talk is infrequent, and people find it difficult to name odors in the laboratory. However, the cross-cultural data show a different picture.
* There are many languages across the globe that have large smell lexicons (smell can even appear in grammar) in which smell talk is also more frequent and naming odors is easy.
* In different cultural and ecological niches odors play a significant role in everyday life.
* These differences in smell language can have consequences for how people think about odors.
Abstract: The human sense of smell can accomplish astonishing feats, yet there remains a prevailing belief that olfactory language is deficient. Numerous studies with English speakers support this view: there are few terms for odors, odor talk is infrequent, and naming odors is difficult. However, this is not true across the world. Many languages have sizeable smell lexicons — smell is even grammaticalized. In addition, for some cultures smell talk is more frequent and odor naming easier. This linguistic variation is as yet unexplained but could be the result of ecological, cultural, or genetic factors or a combination thereof. Different ways of talking about smells may shape aspects of olfactory cognition too. Critically, this variation sheds new light on this important sensory modality.
Keywords olfactionlanguageculturecognitionolfactory expertspsycholinguistics
Do Different Ways of Talking About Smell Affect How We Think About Smell?
What, if any, cognitive consequences are there as a result of these diverse smell vocabularies? The realization of differential linguistic coding of olfaction has only recently been taken seriously by the cognitive science community, so studies of the cognitive consequences are nascent (see also Box 3). The studies to date suggest a mixed picture.
Hunter-Gatherers and Wine Experts: Everyday versus Institutional Language and Cognition
The fact that some cultures have smell lexicons has been interpreted by some as a type of ‘expertise’ affecting language and thought [28] (Figure I). While lay English speakers show a lack of regard for smell, wine experts, perfumers, and the gourmand have cultivated their noses. So, are the wine experts’ and hunter-gatherers’ smell knowledge equivalent? The answer appears to be no. Although expertise certainly has relevance for understanding the relationship between olfaction and language, there are important differences between everyday cultural knowledge and institutional expertise.
The trajectory of learning is critically different between everyday and expert knowledge: people acquire cultural categories effortlessly in childhood, via language, and with little explicit instruction; experts, by contrast, acquire categories from institutions effortfully, usually later in life through explicit instruction, and knowledge has to be mapped onto language. In addition, I propose three specific properties that differ between everyday and institutional olfactory language and cognition.
Experts Individuate, Cultures Categorize
Everyday categories generalize over exemplars to capture broad similarities. Jahai, for example, distinguishes plʔeŋ smells (characteristic of blood, raw meat, fish, etc.) from cŋɛs smells (e.g., bat dropping, smoke, petrol, etc.) and haʔɛ̃t smells (e.g., shrimp paste, sap of rubber tree, rotten meat, etc.), all of which are simply stinky in English. By contrast, experts are trained to distinguish very closely related entities, for example, distinguishing fake jasmine from the real thing. This is why when experts develop lexicons, they tend to focus on specifying and identifying an exact odor [121,122].
Specialist Knowledge Is Subdomain Specific, but Cultural Knowledge Is Domain General
The hunter-gatherer Jahai name odors with higher consensus than their Western counterparts and apply their basic smell terms to novel odors they have never previously encountered [39]. Wine experts, too, show high consensus when describing the smell of wine [123., 124., 125., 126.], but this ability does not generalize beyond their domain of expertise: they are no better than laypeople at describing the smell of coffee or naming other everyday odors [123,125]. Similarly, wine experts have better memory [123] and imagery [127] only for odors in their domain of expertise (see also [122]).
Specialist Olfactory Cognition Is Language Independent, but Cultural Cognition Is Language Dependent
There is a strong link between language and memory for odors in everyday cognition: odors named correctly are remembered more accurately [128,129]. However, specialists do not show this relationship between odor naming and odor memory for their domain of expertise and inhibiting the use of language during encoding does not impair odor memory [123]. In sum, the evidence to date suggests that everyday but not specialist olfactory memory relies on language in the moment.
Figure I. Everyday Olfactory Cognition Differs in Key Ways from Olfactory Cognition in Specialist Expert Contexts.
American woman at a wine tasting (left); ritual healing of Seri infant by shaman using desert lavender (right).
Olfactory Language and Emotion
Within a language, the same odor is experienced as pleasant or unpleasant depending on the label it is given [100,101], raising the question of whether cross-cultural differences in naming strategies may likewise affect the perceived pleasantness of an odor. It appears they do not. Jahai and Dutch speakers use different strategies to talk about odors (abstract basic smell terms vs concrete source-based descriptions) and this may therefore lead to differences in the perceived pleasantness of odors, with some accounts predicting that abstract concepts are more valenced whereas others suggest they are more detached from sensory experience. By comparing facial expressions elicited by monomolecular odors while participants were engaged in an odor-naming task, Majid and colleagues found that both groups had the same initial affective responses to odors, regardless of the odor language they used [39]. These results suggest that the pleasantness of an odor is experienced swiftly and universally, whereas odor identification is slower and cross-culturally diverse. Critically, the role of language in odor perception may differ in important ways depending on whether it is recruited during production or comprehension (Box 2).
Olfactory Language and Cross-Modal Associations
Olfactory and visual information are intimately tied, with connectivity analyses showing that integration happens as early as the primary olfactory cortex [102], and when people are asked to associate odors with colors they do so in systematic ways [58,103., 104., 105., 106.]. This could happen in at least two ways: odor perceptual representations could link directly to color due to statistical co-occurrences in the environment or the association between odors and colors could be mediated by language. According to the language-mediated account of odor–color associations, if people use basic smell words to name abstract odor qualities (e.g., musty) they should show weaker odor–color associations than those who refer to their source (e.g., smells like banana). To test this, one study compared urban-dwelling Thai and hunter-gatherer Maniq (who both have basic smell vocabulary) with urban-dwelling Dutch participants (who overwhelmingly use source-based odor naming) and found that odor–color associations were mediated by language [103]. People had weaker odor–color associations when they used basic smell vocabulary, but when source-based vocabulary was used, color choices more accurately reflected their source. By the time a child is 6 years old, odor–color associations are culture specific, and odor naming plays an important role in their development [104].
Concluding Remarks
Human olfaction serves diverse functions some of which are shared across species. But humans also uniquely use olfaction deliberatively for religious, medicinal, and aesthetic purposes — and language plays a critical role in coordinating these activities. Despite the prevailing view that there is no olfactory language, this review highlights diverse communities worldwide that have basic smell vocabularies and where smell talk is more frequent. Rather than focusing on constrained experimental tasks, olfactory researchers could benefit from considering human olfaction in all of its contexts to study how people across the globe use, manipulate, and talk about odors in their day-to-day contexts (see Outstanding Questions).
Are smell words more likely to lexicalize some odors than others? Is there a predictable order of lexicalization or is each odor vocabulary uniquely fitted to its ecological and cultural niche?
Do languages with basic smell terms also have more smell-associated words? Modality exclusivity norms from English reveal a set of smell-associated words, although these are fewer in number than for the other senses. Studies have confirmed the same trend in several European languages (Dutch [130], Italian [131,132], Russian [133], Serbian [134]) and in Mandarin [135]. Critically, no norms have yet been collected from languages with attested smell vocabularies.
Non-literal metaphorical use of smell language appears in some languages (e.g., Seri [80]) but not others (e.g., Jahai). What smell metaphors are used across languages and how common are they?
Before abandoning the deodorization hypothesis, it is worth considering some complications. Words and meanings change over time: words currently with a smell meaning may not have had that meaning in the past and vice versa. Historical comparison is reliant on text written in a standardized, formal register. Smell may be less frequent there because of taboos surrounding smelliness [136]; conversely, smell may be more evident in slang. Intriguingly, there is a large slang lexicon for the ‘nose’ [137], but no systematic study of smell itself.
Language plays a critical role in odor–color associations but perhaps not in odor–temperature [138] or odor–music [139] associations. Which cross-modal odor associations are mediated by language and culture?
Is the relationship between language and olfaction symmetrical or asymmetrical? Evidence from Western languages suggests it may be symmetrical (Box 2); is the same true for languages with basic smell terms?
Does the trajectory of learning olfactory language differ between children and adults (Box 3)? What conditions give rise to domain-general versus domain-specific olfactory abilities?
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