Linguistic descriptions and cultural models of olfaction in Umpila and English

Abstract

People describe olfactory phenomena in various ways. Some, like Umpila speakers (Pama-Nyungan, Cape York Peninsula, Australia), most commonly describe smells in terms of their pleasantness and other subjective evaluations (e.g., kanti ‘intense of sense’, miintha ‘good’, kuntha ‘strong’). Others, like English speakers, most commonly refer to real-world entities (e.g., floral, woody, like pizza). However, the reasons why a language community might use one strategy over another is not yet clear. Drawing on Cultural Model Theory, this study elucidates why speakers of each language may rely on their preferred strategy in accordance with the different olfactory-related cultural practices and ideologies in the respective speaker communities. Umpila speakers have salient cultural models of Country (i.e., the conceptualisation of land/seas/skies as a being with which the Umpila people form a reciprocal relationship with interconnected rights and responsibilities) and resultingly, Country recognises ‘locals’ from ‘strangers’ according to their smell. Being recognised as a local or stranger can have good/bad effects, aligning with the reliance on evaluative descriptions. Important Western cultural models include histories of using smells to signify class and smells being treated as carriers of disease. These models feed into the modern deodorisation and perfuming practices of today, which require a balance between subjective information and precise perceptual detail, which source-based descriptions allow for. The connection between cultural models and linguistic behaviour allows us to further understand the relationship between not only olfactory but sensory culture and sensory language in the minds of speakers.