"We can speak of shared sensory experiences and those that are not shared. Sight and hearing are common to us all and often we don't even talk about them. But everyone perceives taste and smell differently in space and time," says Karin Zurbuchen, a doctoral candidate in linguistics at Tallinn University. That's why people can only share experiences of smell, taste and touch through language.

In her soon-to-be-defended doctoral dissertation, Zurbuchen conducted a comparative study of Estonian and German vocabulary related to color, smell and taste. She interviewed 126 people, half of whom were native Estonian speakers and half native German speakers. All participants were asked to describe how they use words within each of the three semantic fields.

On one hand, vocabulary related to color has been the most extensively studied in Estonia and around the world. On the other hand, Zurbuchen notes that smell and taste tend to be sidelined among the senses. "If we're not required to express them, then we lack corresponding linguistic markers — or we have significantly fewer of them," she points out.

Surprisingly few differences

In her research, Zurbuchen focused on the active vocabulary related to color, smell and taste in Estonian and German. "Active vocabulary is best understood as our shared core vocabulary — words we truly use every day, words we know and recognize," she explains.

Passive vocabulary, by contrast, consists of words people understand but don't use as often in spoken language. "I was somewhat surprised that, across all three vocabularies, the results for Estonian and German were unexpectedly similar. I genuinely expected there to be more differences," Zurbuchen recalls.

When it came to color vocabulary, similarities between the two languages outweighed the differences. In both Estonian and German, Zurbuchen says, basic color terms such as red, blue and green hold a central place. Estonian has 11 of these terms and German 12. Red was most often named first in both languages. "Both languages also commonly use color loanwords, as well as metonymic derivatives like ocher, turquoise or purple, where a color term has developed from an object that typically bears that color," the doctoral candidate points out.

Additionally, both Estonian and German speakers frequently formed compound words in their active color vocabularies, especially using prefixes such as hele- (light) and tume- (dark). Color words referencing specific objects — such as lilac, olive or wine — were also fairly common. According to Zurbuchen, the most frequent object-based terms in both languages were related to nature and natural phenomena. "Interestingly, both languages predominantly featured compounds linked to the sea and sky and nature-based colors whose root words were blue and green," she notes.

Olfactory inputs more often unpleasant

Zurbuchen's doctoral research also found strong similarities in the smell and taste vocabulary of both languages studied. "Estonian and German, by their nature, are similar to other languages spoken in Western, urbanized societies, where basic, neutral smell terms are largely absent. Our olfactory vocabulary is mostly evaluative — we tend to talk about smells in terms of whether they are pleasant or unpleasant," she explains. Interestingly, speakers of both languages also tended to describe smells in negative terms, associating them more often with unfavorable emotions.

Because distinct, neutral smell terms are lacking, people often describe smells using words from other sensory categories. For example, the word that most often came to mind in both Estonian and German when talking about smells was the taste word sweet. Some words even crossed into the domain of touch, such as sharp or fiery (spicy). "Smell and taste are closely linked. Since we lack specific, dedicated smell words, we borrow from taste vocabulary and largely describe smells based on taste experience," Zurbuchen explains.

Both Estonian and German have four basic taste terms: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. "These appeared in exactly the same order in my results," the doctoral candidate notes.

Zurbuchen also examined the strategies people use to describe taste. "We mainly describe taste in evaluative terms — whether something is pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad," she points out. In many cases, speakers of both languages also based their descriptions on the physical properties of food and drink — characteristics perceived through the sense of touch, such as temperature, consistency and texture.

The smell of grandma's cupboard

Based on her comparison of active sensory vocabulary in Estonian and German, Karin Zurbuchen concludes that Estonian speakers perceive the world in much the same way as speakers in language communities shaped by a Western, urban lifestyle. "Our perception of the world, judging by our sensory vocabulary, is very Western," she says.

According to Zurbuchen, this shift toward Westernization has taken place over the past 20 years. "When I compared my results to those of a study conducted two decades ago, my Estonian-language data did not resemble the Estonian data from back then — it aligned much more closely with the German results," she points out.

The most significant changes have occurred in vocabulary related to taste and smell. One clear indicator, she says, is the emergence of the word umami in active taste vocabulary. In German, umami is already considered part of that core vocabulary. In Estonian, Zurbuchen sees a strong trend in that direction. "In the study from 20 years ago, umami didn't appear at all. In my results, however, it now holds a prominent place," she notes.

According to Zurbuchen, this shift suggests that people have become more aware. "My overarching conclusion is that this is a result of globalization. Broader access to travel and the expansion of our sensory horizons — particularly in terms of taste and smell — have contributed to this change," she says.

Rising living standards, the growth of gastronomy and culinary culture and the introduction of a wide variety of international cuisines to Estonia over the past two decades have also played a role. "There was a time when you couldn't even buy fresh cucumbers at the store. Now, just look at the fruit and vegetable section — it speaks for itself and directly reflects our increasingly hedonistic tendencies," the researcher observes.

Taste and smell perception are highly individual, Zurbuchen notes. Kristel Vene, a food technologist at Tallinn University of Technology, has also pointed out that each person has a specific number of taste and smell genes, which express themselves to varying degrees. This largely determines how people experience different flavors and scents. Because the experience is so personal, Zurbuchen says, tastes and smells carry meanings that people often aren't even consciously aware of. "My advice to all readers is to take a brief pause amid the rush of everyday life and reflect, for example, on how your grandmother's cupboard used to smell," she says.

Karin Zurbuchen, a doctoral candidate at Tallinn University's School of Humanities, will defend her dissertation, "An Empirical Study of Active Color, Taste and Smell Vocabulary in Estonian and German," on October 9 at Tallinn University. Her supervisors are Professor Reili Argus of Tallinn University and lead researcher Ene Vainik of the Institute of the Estonian Language. The opponents are Professor Tuomas Huumo of the University of Turku and Associate Professor Ann Veismann of the University of Tartu.

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