Black and White and Red All Over

While the human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors, we have a limited number of words we can use to talk about color. You could argue that you don’t need all that many basic color terms – after all English only has a dozen or so. (A basic term being a color word without any modifiers; green is a basic color word but not light green or forest green). Different languages have different numbers of basic color words ranging from over a dozen to as few to two. Although a language might only have 2 color words, usually “light” and “dark”, it doesn’t mean that its speakers don’t perceive or recognize other colors. In fact regardless of language of origin and how many basic color words it has, everyone around the world mostly agrees when asked to pick out the “purest” or “reddest” red (or other color) from a group of samples.

The best way to explain this confusing concept is with a word that English is missing. For example, Italian and Japanese have a basic color word that isn’t found in English, azzurro and sorairo. The first translates as royal blue and the second as sky blue, but it’s considered different from “regular” blue in the way that we consider orange and yellow to be different basic colors. Of course, once translated, we English speakers have no problem understanding the concept of azzurro or sorairo and we can distinguish it from blu and ao (regular blue, respectively) in a lineup.

In particular, the world seems to linguistically diverge specifically in the green, blue, and gray family. Many languages all over the world have one word that covers two or three of these colors. Some scholars think this could be related to the color of the ocean, which can vary so much in perceived color. This blue/green/gray phenomenon is very common, cropping up in African, Scandinavian, Celtic, and East Asian languages. Irish is even more unusual in that it has two words for green. One refers to green plants, and the other refers to artificial green, such as paint and clothes. This distinction has to be made even if the hues are exactly the same.

Of course, we adopt and exchange words, too. Japanese has no native word for the color pink, as it used to be considered just another shade of light red. This is changing as they now have borrowed the English term giving them pinku. However, English didn’t originally have a dedicated term for pink either – we also thought it was light red. The word pink was originally the name of a flower. It still is the name of the flower, but almost all usage is to talk about other pink-colored items. Same story for orange.

Another interesting cultural artifact is the colors associated with political parties. Speaking in very general terms, most of the world (particularly Europe) traditionally associated blue with conservatives (what’s more traditional and stable?) and red with liberal (energetic and progressive). This used to be true in America as well, since our political heritage is European. However, only in the last decade or so we’ve begun discussing Red states and Blue states as conservative and liberal, respectively. And even more recently, we can sometimes talk about swing states as purple states.

Try this interesting site that compares colors and the names we give them. Is your mustard yellow the same as others'? It's broken down by gender, too, since men and women anatomically and sometimes culturally perceive color differently.