"Five key colours
Remarkably, most of the world’s languages have five basic colour terms. Cultures as diverse as the Himba in the Namibian plains and the Berinmo in the lush rainforests of Papua New Guinea employ such five term systems. As well as dark, light, and red, these languages typically have a term for yellow, and a term that denotes both blue and green. That is, these languages do not have separate terms for “green” and “blue” but use one term to describe both colours, a sort of “grue”.
People see colours differently according to the way their language categorises them. Shutterstock
Historically, Welsh had a “grue” term, namely glas, as did Japanese and Chinese. Nowadays, in all these languages, the original grue term has been restricted to blue, and a separate green term is used. This is either developed from within the language – as is the case for Japanese – or through lexical borrowing, as is the case for Welsh.
Russian, Greek, Turkish and many other languages also have two separate terms for blue – one referring exclusively to darker shades, and one referring to lighter shades.
Language and colour
The way we perceive colours can also change during our lifetime. Greek speakers who have two fundamental colour terms to describe light and dark blue – “ghalazio” and “ble” – are more prone to see these two colours as more similar after living for long periods of time in the UK – where these two colours are described in English by the same fundamental colour term: blue.
This is because after long term everyday exposure to an English speaking environment, the brain of native Greek speakers starts interpreting the colours “ghalazio” and “ble” as part of the same colour category.
But this isn’t just something that happens with colour, in fact different languages can influence our perceptions in all areas of life. And in our lab at Lancaster University we are investigating how the use of and exposure to different languages changes the way we perceive everyday objects. Ultimately, this happens because learning a new language is like giving our brain the ability to interpret the world differently – including the way we see and process colours.
