Source — Luu, "The Cozy Linguistics of Hygge and Other 'Untranslatable' Words"
- Title: The Cozy Linguistics of Hygge and Other "Untranslatable" Words
- Author: Chi Luu
- Publication: JSTOR Daily
- Date: 2016-12-07
- URL: https://daily.jstor.org/cozy-linguistics-hygge-untranslatable-words/
- Type: secondary / popular linguistics journalism, skeptical of the phenomenon it describes
- Accessed: 2026-08-28
Extract
- Frames hygge (Danish, popularly glossed "coziness") as the flagship case of the 2016 untranslatable-word wave: the comforts it names — candlelight, warm textiles, close company — are not exclusive to Denmark, and the word itself is a Norwegian loan, which Luu treats as ironic given claims of Danish national ownership.
- Argues explicitly that these words are not genuinely untranslatable: they can be unpacked with a phrase or sentence; what is missing in English is a single lexical item, not the concept.
- Observes a pattern in which the genre selects for words naming emotional/social states, rarely for concrete objects or foods — i.e., the "untranslatable" label clusters on affect words, not on nouns for physical things.
- Invokes the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis by name and distinguishes a strong form (language determines thought) from a weaker form (language influences habitual thought). Cites research on color-term vocabulary as evidence against the strong form: speakers of languages with fewer basic color terms still perceive the same color distinctions perceptually.
- Reads the whole listicle genre as a symptom of the source culture (English-speaking, especially US) rather than of the target words: the appetite for imported "untranslatable" feeling-words reflects, in her framing, an anxiety in English-language culture about a perceived deficit of emotional vocabulary or authenticity, not a genuine linguistic gap.