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Inhaling the delicate bouquet of a glass of wine can leave most of us at a loss for words to describe what we are smelling.

But it turns out it may be our language that is hampering our sense of smell.

Scientists have found that English speakers struggle to identify and describe odours compared to other languages.

I'm getting blackberries and thistles: The English language is not the best for describing odours say scientists

Researchers found those who use English as their first language can take five times as long to describe an odour than they can a colour.

However, native speakers from the Jahai tribe in Perak, Malaysia, described odours far more consistently and in less time than they can a colour.

The Jahai have at least 12 specific abstract words that relate to smells while the Maniq, a tribe of hunter gatherers in southern Thailand, have 15 words.

These abstract words describe smells in the same way as we use blue, red and yellow to describe colours. 

The findings suggest English speakers appear to have lost the ability to accurately describe smells.

Professor Asifa Majid, who led the work at the centre for language studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, said: 'Our findings show that the long-held assumption that people are bad at naming smells is not universally true.

'Odours are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language.'

Professor Majid has found that the English language has few specific words that are capable of describing smells.

One of the few that is used is the term 'musty', which describes a stuffy and dusty odour of an old book or room that has been unused for a long time.

Most of the time English speakers have to rely upon the source of the smell as a description - using words like fruity or lemon.

In a study published in the journal Cognition, Professor Majid asked 10 American English speakers and 10 native speakers of the Jahai to describe colours and odours.

They were presented with 12 odours, including cinnamon, turpentine, lemon, smoke, chocolate, rose, onion and gasoline, and 80 different colours.

They found that when describing the odours, there was little agreement among English speakers when describing the odours.

The Jahai use 12 abstract words to describe odours (shown, left) in the same way they do colours (right)

In many western societies, smell has become a largely under-used sense. In many cases odours have become something undesirable and to be avoided, according to Professor Majid (picture posed by a model)

They also used far longer descriptions when identifying the smells.

For example when presented with a cinnamon odour, English speakers described it as spicy, sweet, candy, smoky, wine and pot pourri.

However, the Jahai were found to use a series of succinct terms to describe the smells, such words that mean to 'smell edible' and 'to have a bloody smell that attracts tigers'.

These works were predominantly abstract words, much like those they used for colour.

However, while abstract words were dominant among the English speakers when describing colour, they used source based descriptions.

In a later study in the journal of Cognition, Professor Majid and her colleagues looked at the language of the Maniq, a 300 strong nomadic tribe in southern Thailand, and found they use words for smell that have complex meanings.

They wrote: 'Smell is particularly important in the lives of the Maniq, and lies at the core of the indigenous ideology.

The table above shows the specific abstract words used by the Maniq tribes to describe different odours

'The Maniq surround themselves with odors believed to be beneficial for health and that repel danger. They stay constantly alert for potentially harmful odors.

'The Maniq system is remarkable because there are dedicated terms for olfaction and these are part of everyday talk.

Western languages simply lack this. When describing smells, English speakers, for example, most often resort to source-descriptors, such as like a banana or fruity, but even these descriptors are not applied accurately.'

It is unclear exactly why English speakers have lost the ability to describe smells accurately, but vision has become the predominant sense in almost all human cultures.

In a recent study published in the journal of Cognitive Linguistics, Professor Majid and her colleagues found that English speakers use specific words for vision and hearing but have few for the other senses like touch, smell and taste.

There is a similar pattern in other western languages.

However, smell plays a far greater role in the language of the Semai of Malaysia, for example.

Speaking to New Scientist, Professor Majid said: 'There seems to be something culturally different too.

'People in the West seem to do everything they can to get rid of smells, and in many contexts odour is a taboo topic.

'This might be linked to changes in our smell environment since the industrial revolution.

'If you read stories from the UK or France from before the revolution, there's sewage in the streets and people are using perfume to cover up body odour.

'These days, we do everything we can to sanitise our environment.'