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Journal Article

Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of Maniq

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Wnuk,  Ewelina
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Majid,  Asifa
Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University;
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University;
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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COGNIT_2728_Revised-1.pdf
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Citation

Wnuk, E., & Majid, A. (2014). Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of Maniq. Cognition, 131, 125-138. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.12.008.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0014-CC92-0
Abstract
It is widely believed that human languages cannot encode odors. While this is true for English,
and other related languages, data from some non-Western languages challenge this
view. Maniq, a language spoken by a small population of nomadic hunter–gatherers in
southern Thailand, is such a language. It has a lexicon of over a dozen terms dedicated
to smell. We examined the semantics of these smell terms in 3 experiments (exemplar
listing, similarity judgment and off-line rating). The exemplar listing task confirmed that
Maniq smell terms have complex meanings encoding smell qualities. Analyses of the
similarity data revealed that the odor lexicon is coherently structured by two dimensions.
The underlying dimensions are pleasantness and dangerousness, as verified by the off-line
rating study. Ethnographic data illustrate that smell terms have detailed semantics tapping
into broader cultural constructs. Contrary to the widespread view that languages cannot
encode odors, the Maniq data show odor can be a coherent semantic domain, thus shedding
new light on the limits of language.