The project “Perceptual modalities across languages and cultures in the Malay Peninsula” drew to a close at the end of 2017. The project was highly successful, culminating in the recent publication of Majid & Kruspe (2018) in the prestigious journal “Current Biology”, and favourable peer review (Olofsson & Wilson, 2018).


Aim
The original proposal was to conduct a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural exploration of semantic categories in the Aslian (Austroasiatic) languages of the Malay Peninsula. This innovative comparative study sought to investigate how two modalities in the language of perception—vision and olfaction—fared in different linguistic and cultural settings, and to determine to what extent they are influenced by language inheritance, subsistence, or environment.

The elaborate lexical distinctions of smell previously reported for some Aslian languages provide compelling counterevidence to the long held Western scientific belief that of the five Aristotelian senses, smell is the least significant to humans, and as such languages lack semantic classification in this domain. While visual perception has long been considered the highest of the senses, olfaction has been thought to retain only vestigial significance to humans (Pinker 1997). It has been claimed that although humans have the capacity to perceive thousands of smells ‘in none of the world’s languages does there seem to be a classification of smells comparable for example to color classification…There is no semantic field of smells’. (Sperber 1974/1975).

With the evidence drawn exclusively from Northern Aslian hunter-gatherer languages (Burenhult and Majid 2011; Wnuk and Majid 2012), this project sought to compare two related Southern Aslian languages, one spoken by a hunter gatherer group, the other by non-hunter gatherers. Like the Northern Aslian languages, the Southern ones also exhibit extensive evidence of basic monolexemic smell terms, akin to ‘basic color terms’ (Berlin and Kay 1969).

In a subsequent study, Majid and Burenhult (2014) reported that the Northern Aslian Jahai are equally adept at naming odours as they are at naming colours, in contrast to a comparable group of English speakers from the USA who, while able to consistently name colours, struggled to name odours. It was unclear what underlied the development of complex olfactory lexica, and improved ability to name odours.


Implementation
Data from four languages was collected over five field trips (2014 – 2017) that I undertook in Malaysia. Results from the experimental data were coded by me in Sweden; the statistical analyses were carried out by Prof. Majid’s lab at Radboud U. The results were co-authored.


Results
My research provided new evidence suggesting that the inability to name odours is a culturally contingent fact related to subsistence mode. Despite the Semelai and Semaq Beri languages being closely related, and the speakers occupying the same ecological niche—the tropical rainforests of the Malay Peninsula—the results from the naming task revealed a striking difference. The Semaq Beri behaved like the hunter-gatherer Jahai, while the non-hunter-gatherers behaved exactly like English speakers. In spite of having a complex olfactory lexicon, the Semelai speakers were as poor at naming odours as the US English speakers. This mismatch is assumed not to be grounded in either environment, or language. Both languages have extensive lexicons of odour terms, and in both languages these belong to the verbal word class.
Although there is known to be some difference in olfactory receptors among different populations in Africa, there is no relevant data for the groups in our study, so we were unable to explore this angle. However, the neurological processing of olfaction and language take place in different areas in the brain, so it is considered unlikely that there should be any connection between the two.

The findings from the experimental aspect of the study were published in the high prestige Cell Press journal Current Biology (impact factor 8.851) in January 2018. Open access funding was used to purchase full open access for the article from the date of publication.

The paper was also selected by Cell Press to feature in Current Biology’s Dispatches series. The research was reviewed by two leading scholars in the field of olfaction, Olofsson, J.K. & D.A Wilson (2018), Human Olfaction: It Takes Two Villages, Current Biology 28, R103-126, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.016). The authors note the refreshing approach to olfactory science, focusing on language and culture as opposed to molecular aspects of odour, “Majid and Kruspe (2018) elegantly link olfaction to a long-standing tradition in anthropology and linguistics, which might inspire new and innovative olfactory language experiments”.
On the contribution of this research to the field, “The study by Majid and Kruspe (2018), together with new developments in sensory plasticity, genetics and cognition, may thus pave the way for exciting new explorations of olfaction at the crossroad between biology and culture”.

In all, our paper attracted intense international interest, with articles appearing in over 40 media outlets worldwide including the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, New Scientist, Neue Zuercher Zeitung, further publications from Russia to Israel and the Philippines, and BBC World radio, National Public Radio, and ARD Germany, as well as discussions on Twitter. Unfortunately, it did not receive publicity locally in Sweden.

Two further publications will complement the initial one, fleshing out in detail the linguistic and cultural aspects of olfaction in the two focal societies. Both are completed and awaiting revision following comments from peers.

 The first manuscript, with the provisional title “The linguistics of odour in Semelai and Semaq Beri”, reports on Objective 2, the grammar of olfaction. It will shortly be submitted for publication to an appropriate open access linguistics journal. The paper presents a general overview of perception verbs in the two languages, followed by a detailed description of the grammatical and semantic properties of olfactory quality verbs, illustrated by examples of their natural use. This is the first detailed study of olfactory verbs in a Southern Aslian language, and the first comparative description. It demonstrates how olfactory verbs are a subclass of regular stative intransitive verbs.

The second manuscript, provisionally entitled “Smell Cultures: A Comparative Account of Aslian Hunter-Gatherers and Non-Hunter-Gatherers of the Malay Peninsula”, presents a comparative account of the ethnology of odour. It is currently being revised for submission to an anthropological journal, following a previous rejection. The goal of this publication is to document the role of olfactory practices in the respective cultures in order to try to determine whether cultural factors may be contributing to the difference in odour-naming, and if so, exactly which ones. While the cultural significance of odour in some Aslian societies has been often cited in the cultural anthropology of the senses, this is the first indepth and dedicated investigation into this topic, not only in Southern Aslian, but Aslian in general. There has been little ethnographic work on either of the focal communities, in particular on the hunter-gatherer Semaq Beri. This paper fills a void.

The multimedia materials collected during the course of the project, have been archived at The Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage (RWAAI) and accredited to RJ project: P13-0381:1. RWAAI (www.lu.se/RWAAI) is an RJ-funded resource at Lund University dedicated to the long-term preservation of research collections documenting Austroasiatic languages. It is also the repository for the requested open access storage of the supplementary materials for Majid & Kruspe (2018).


Deviation
With the emergence of the highly intriguing finding singling out subsistence, the decision was made to collect data from a third Aslian field site. This deviated from the original plan where I had sought to move onto the unrelated language Malay. Recalling that to date only one non-hunter-gatherer group has been tested, the additional dataset was collected with a view to expanding our sample to further test to see if the correlation between higher codability and subsistence mode is replicated in other non-hunter gatherer Aslian groups, and that the Semelai are not an anomaly. Data was collected from the Southern Aslian language Mah Meri, a closely-related non-hunter gatherer group. The prediction is that the Mah Meri colour- and odour-naming responses should pattern with the Semelai results. I have worked with this community for 20 years, and knew their language to have a robust odour vocabulary (Kruspe 2010). The research uncovered additional lexical distinctions, further expanding our knowledge in this domain. A statistically comparable group was tested over two field trips, and the responses have been coded and await analysis by Prof. Majid’s lab. Investigations were also made into the grammar of perception in Mah Meri, and the ethnography of odour. A dataset was also collected from Temuan, an unrelated Malay (Austronesian) language, to fulfill our original aim of including a language from a different family. The results have been transcribed and coded, and await statistical analysis. There was some evidence of dedicated odour terms, but not to the same extent as the Aslian languages. The findings will be published as a follow-up to Majid and Kruspe (2018).

International collaboration
Over the course of the project, I have worked closely with Professor Asifa Majid (Radboud University, MPI, Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and her research group based at Radboud U. Professor Majid advised on design study and implementation of objective 1, which dealt with the experimental component of the project. She and her team carried out the statistical analyses of the data.

I attended two workshops with Majid’s group (Zakopane Retreat, Poland October 2015, and Nijmegen November 2016), gained valuable insights into the broader field of odour research, and benefitted from discussions with participants. This has lead to further collaboration. In summer 2017 I conducted further experiments across three communities, that will contribute to a global cross-cultural study on odour perception. The non-linguistic study examines the role of ‘pleasantness’ in shaping odour perception, and tests whether there is a fundamental difference in the way that hunter-gatherers and non-hunter-gatherers perceive odour, or whether the difference lies in the language.  The study is a direct response to questions that arose from this study. The results will appear in a joint-authored high-profile article.


Future goals
This research has contributed new empirical data, to the debate on language and the senses. The results will also feed into much broader research into olfaction in psychology, biology, and genetics, as noted by Olofsson and Wilson (2018).

In July 2018 I will present our findings at the 12th conference of the International Society of Hunter and Gatherer Studies, Penang, Malaysia, in the session “Hunter-gatherers and the senses”. We hope to stimulate interest among other hunter-gatherer researchers to replicate this study in non-Aslian hunter-gatherer settings in order to further validate our findings.

One of the questions that arose is whether the difference in codability is due to genetic variation. No current data exists, but a local Malaysian geneticist has expressed interest in possible collaboration to explore this issue.

Personally, the project has initiated a fruitful new research trajectory in language and perception. New insights I gained into the equally ephemeral domain of audition have resulted in a VR-funded research project—"Singing spiders, sobbing stones: explorations in the language of sound in Aslian languages”—investigating another perceptual domain that is thought to be poorly represented in language.