Which do you find easier to describe: the colour of grass, or its smell? The answer may depend on where you are from – and, more specifically, which language you grew up speaking.

Humans are often characterised as visual beings. If you are a native English speaker, you may intuitively agree. After all, English has a rich vocabulary for colours and geometric shapes, but few words for smells. However, a recent global study suggests that whether we mainly experience the world by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or feeling varies hugely across cultures. And this preference is reflected in our language.

The study was based on tests conducted by 26 researchers across 20 languages in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia, with locations ranging from big modern cities to remote indigenous villages. Participants were asked to describe so-called sensory stimulants, such as coloured paper, a sip of sugar water, or a sniff of a scented card.

The results suggest that our lifestyle, our environment and even the shape of our houses all can influence how we perceive things – and how easy (or not) we find it to put this perception into words.

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“I think we often think about language as giving us direct information about the world,” says Asifa Majid, a professor of language, communication, and cultural cognition at the University of York, who led the research. “You can see that in how we think about the senses and how that’s reflected in modern-day science.”

Majid says that many textbooks for example refer to humans as visual creatures.

“Part of the rationale for that has been the amount of brain that’s devoted to vision versus smell, for example. But another piece of crucial evidence has been language. So often people say, well, look, there are just many more words to talk about things that we see, and we struggle to talk about things that we smell,” she says.