The World Color Survey is a massive project which attempts to understand how colors are categorized in different languages. The researchers studied 110 different languages, none of which had a written component, which ensured that only spoken word categories would be used to describe the colors.
Do the speakers all understand colors the same way? Is “red” red whether you’re speaking Chumburu or Saramaccan? Rolf Kuehni undertook an analysis of the data to try to find out.
To discuss colors and language, it’s important to differentiate between the word we’re using to describe a color, and the color itself. Color researchers use the term “gloss” to distinguish between the two. So “red gloss” is the word being used to describe the color red (which might be “rouge”, “rosso”, or “red”), while “red” refers to the color itself (since we’re speaking English right now). In the World Color Survey, four hues were identified as unique — red, green, yellow, and blue.
This means that each of these colors tend to have unique words to describe them in each language. For example, in English, though we distinguish between light green and dark green, we understand that both colors are also green. In this sense, only the green gloss is unique. We never use the blue gloss to describe the color green.
Forty-one of the 110 languages in the survey have words corresponding to each unique hue. In each language, the range of colors identified as corresponding to the gloss for each color spans nearly the identical range of hues. Here’s a graph summarizing those results for 38 of the languages (3 were eliminated from analysis because too few participants spoke those languages):
The numbers along the bottom of the chart correspond to physical color chips that researchers used to display colors. Consider the yellow gloss. Once it has been determined that a particular language has a word for “yellow,” researchers asked observers speaking to pick the color chip that best represents that color. As you can see, for each language, the range of colors chosen was nearly identical.
But what about the other 69 languages? Their results actually followed a similar pattern in most cases. For example, 40 of the languages had a term corresponding to “grue” — a mixture of green and blue. These languages still broke the colors into similar categories, but lumped two of the categories together. Even among languages that had all four color categories, “blue” and “green” were the most frequently confused colors. Other languages had words for “grelow” and “relow,” but overall, there was close to 90 percent agreement on the boundaries of color categories.
Kuehni argues that this is evidence for common color categories in all humans. He’s careful to point out that while this doesn’t rule out the possibility that colors are culturally determined, given the wide range of cultures studied here, it’s strong support for the idea that color categories are determined neurophysiologically — that the way we categorize colors is embedded in the structure of the brain.
Kuehni, R.G. (2005). Focal color variability and unique hue stimulus variability. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5(3-4), 409-426.