Color perception across cultures illuminates our development as a species alongside the inherent natural world around us.

Color is a bridge between language and thought. We see it through our biology, but we conceptualize it in our minds, with language, and context.

Here we will see concrete examples of varying color perception across cultures across the world, both ancient and modern.

More often than not, the differences in color perception result from language and mental framework more so than physiological differences. Exposure to different color families and the language we use to group and identify them can both limit and broaden the different colors we are able to “see.” Our eyes can determine up to 10 million different colors [1], but most languages have just five to eleven main color words.

Read on to see what lies in this bridge between language and thought.

Perception of Color Limited by Language and Exposure, or Vice-Versa?

Sapir-Worf hypothesis:
“a hypothesis, first advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and subsequently developed by Benjamin Whorf, that the structure of a language determines a native speaker’s perception and categorization of experience.”
-Oxford Languages Dictionary

There is an ample body of recent research showing an impact of mother tongue on color processing. However, this relativism is a far cry from Whorf’s theory. In the linguistic study of color language, there is a camp that believes everything is objective, the universalist linguistic interpretation of color across cultures, and another believing all is subjective and up to the culture, the relativist interpretation.

These semantical arguments have many anthropologists heated, some even crying racism at the research of the others. Let’s begin with an over-analyzed quote in Ovid’s Greek epic Illiad, making some analysts go mad with interpretive urges.

A Sea the Color of Wine: Color Perception Across Culture and Time

There is a big debate over a single line in the Iliad that states the sea is “dark wine” colored, since this is commonly used to support the notion that in that time there was no word for blue. In fact, entire New Yorker article about it and a cited JSTOR study.

“[Former British Prime Minister William] Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! […] a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last.”
May 21, 2012 RadioLab BBC, “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?“

They found that Homer used very odd terminology for colors of basic things: “the wine-dark sea,” “wine-colored oxen,” “violet” for iron, “green” for both the color of honey, and “faces pale with fear.”

Gladstone counted page by page the frequency of each color used:

Black: 170x
White: 100x
Red: 13x (the next most frequent..)
Yellow: less than 10x
Green: less than 10x
Blue: 0x

Find this strange, Gladstone searched other classic texts, and discovered similar strange uses of color terms. Ultimately, he had to conclude that all Greeks were colorblind. End of story for him.

Ten years later, Lazarus Geiger decided to search old texts to survey color perception across cultures more widely. He found the exact same phenomenon in everything from “old Icelandic sagas, ancient Chinese, ancient Vedic hymns, the bible (in the original Hebrew), […] no blue!” [Radiolab] Wondering when and how “blue” actually came into the common lexicon, he launched a deeper search.

Geiger came to the conclusion that “the order in which languages seem to acquire these color terms is not entirely random [..] Red is always first, and blue is always last.” This phenonemon occurs not only in the cultures studied, and perfectly matches the color frequency in the Illiad, but has made the whole framework for this field. This is discussed by way of the Basic Color Terms below, and oddly, was recreated with computer algorithms seeking specificity under a limit of delineations.

“The category actually feeds back on your perception, so you notice it more .. having the word for blue, unlocks your ability to see blue.. but without the word you’re still seeing the blue, you’re just not – noticing – it.” Is that the same thing as seeing? “The blue maybe went thru [Homer’s] eyes the same way but it didn’t get into his mind the same way [..] weirdly then.. color is a loss of innocence.”
May 21, 2012 RadioLab BBC, “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?“

An interesting perspective from a commenter states: “blue is the “base” color. [Homer]’d call it a ‘clear sky’- and other colors appearing in it would be mentioned.” -Reddit user “resonanteye.” And, in the BBC transmission, the neurologist experimented on his daughter by never telling her the sky was blue. Eventually, she called it either white or blue, even when it appeared blue to him in both contexts.

We will return to this odd phenomenon of the shortest wavelength color, blue, but first, let’s take a closer look at how color perception across cultures varies all across the world.

Countries far & Wide

The researchers in BBC’s presentation make a very profound point about the bridging of language and thought. It’s a bit of a “chicken-or-the-egg” scenario – does our language make our colors, or do colors motivate the language?

We will see more examples of cultures where lack of color terms manifests in lack of distinction, despite no physiological differences. And, we will in fact find some potential physiological adaptations that depend on geography. But remember through out this, several studies have shown that through training, anyone can broaden their color vocabulary and tell the difference between, for example, nuanced shades of blue.

Russia

Russia’s color perception distinguishes light blue and dark blue as entirely different colors. For light blue, the word is “goluboy” and for darker blues “siniy.”

“I have trouble seeing how you can logically call both of those colors “blue”! Red and orange seem so much more similar to me than dark blue and light blue.”
Reddit User, voikya

Japan

Japan is unique in that they are a very industrialized country, but only added “green” to the lexicon in modern times. In 1917, the first crayons were imported there, with the green color, formally grouped with blue as “”, now termed “midori.” Only in 1951, did elementary school teaching guidelines in Japan have teachers distinguish this new midori color for green.

Additionally, Japanese has no separate word for pink, but simply use “”, meaning “light red.” It makes one wonder how all the different Kawaii fashions, including what in English we may call magenta or fuchsia, are designed.

Papua New Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone.

Dani, the language in Papua New Guinea, and Bassa, the language in Liberia and Sierra Leone, have only two terms: referring to dark and light. Dark is basically equivalent to cool toned colors, and light as warm toned colors. They group black, blue, and green together as cool toned, and colors such as white, red, orange and yellow as warm toned.

Zuni (North American Indigenous tribe, NM/AZ border)

The Zuni tribal language provides a strict example of codability – how the words one has affects identification. Zuni have a single term for yellow and orange. [LR] In a study, this affected their ability to pick out and recall the difference in these colors, even when the actual hues were very different.

Candoshi (Amazonian tribe)

The Candoshi are interesting because researchers suspect they have no word for “color” itself. Instead, for example, they discussed whether an amber-colored chip resembled more fish or fish-spawn. [sapiens] The researcher, Surrallés notes “There’s no reason to think that orange is any more or less a legitimate color than, say, cyan.”

Aboriginal Warlpiri

The Warlpiri people, like the Candoshi, also lack a word for “color” itself. As color perception across cultures varies, we see if the language develops in accordance with utility. This is simply efficiency in verbal resources. In the Warlpiri, they have a more rich vocabulary for describing texture, physical senses of the subject matter, and its functional purposes. [conv]

Context dependent color. Many of their words referred to, for example: red, like ripe fruit, green, like unripe fruits. “If a red chip was on a ceramic surface, it was usually said to be “like ripe fruit,” but if the chip was on the floor, it was more often deemed to be “like blood.”” – Berline & Kay

The Himba People – Can’t see Blue, but Super-See Green

Himba are ones that distinguish green but not blue. They have “serandu” referring to a range of red-tones including pink and orange. Then they have “zoozu” which refers to all the dark colors: brown, black, and dark greens, blues, and purple.(From an American Psychological Association article called “Hues and Views.”)

In a test, Himba were able to very quickly point out the standout color below:

Himba did not pick out the blue square, however,

Ring1 — They quickly pointed out the different shade of green here. Can you see it?

Here shows the color codes, the different green square being in the same spot as the above blue one.

Green and Blue – Green or Blue The Grue-lling Difference

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.

There are potential physiological reasons for “grue”. [nature] But that will be explored in my article with a biological focus explaining how the photorecpetors in eyes work. Here we are sticking to the linguists. The basic thesis there for those curious is that increased exposure to UV light does adapt the lens of the eye to be less able to distinguish different hues of blue”. “We found that a language is more likely to have a dedicated word for blue when it is spoken by a larger population, which resides at higher latitudes (where the incidence of UV-B radiation is lower), and near large bodies of standing water (in particular, lakes).” [nature]

Egyptian Grue

On the shorter wavelength end of the color spectrum, red paints made of ochre go back 60,000 years. Egyptians, in the ancient world, were one of the only ones that had their own word for blue.

The Egyptian word “wadjet” covered blue, blue-green, and green. The eye of horus as well as the patroness of Lower Egypt, goddess Wadjet, were called the same. Similarly, “wedjet” was used for Egyptian blue in ceramics.

Countries’ Color Perception Across Cultures of Green & Blue

Here I’ve collected many of the “grue” or “green and blue”, depending, terminology for some different countries and tribal groups.

Culture	Blue/Green Distinction?	Words (respectively)
Choctaw (America)	light grue, dark grue	okchakko, okchamali
Kanienʼkéha (Canada)	yes	oruía (blue), óhute (green)
Lakota (America)	no	tȟó
Mayan	no	yax
Yebamasa (Colombia)	no	sumese
Tagalog (Old Philipenes)	yes	bugháw (blue), lunti(án) (green)
Tamil (S. Asia)	yes	பச்சை green (paccai), நீலம் blue (neelam)
Chinese	yes	(藍 lán for blue and 綠 lǜ for green
Japanese	contextual	ao (青, n.) and aoi (青い, adj.)
Korean	contextual	푸르다 (Revised Romanization: pureu-da)
Vietnamese	recently separated	xanh, now contextual, xanh da trời (blue skin of sky), xanh lá cây (green of leaves)
Albanian, Baltic, Slavic	yes	all various
Celtic/Welsh	recently separated	glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green
Ancient Greece	yes	γλαυκός (glaukós) “clear light blue” contrasting with χλωρός (khlōrós) “bright green”; for darker shades of both colors, γλαυκός and χλωρός were replaced by κυανός (kuanós), meaning either a “dark blue or green”
Finnish	yes	vihreä (green) and sininen (blue)
Turkish	yes	kök for blue and jasâl for green
Zulu (Africa)	no/contextual	-luhlaza + “like leaves, like sky” depending
Tswana (Africa)	no	tala
Himba (Africa)	no	buru

The phenomenon of having no separate words for green and blue may be surprising to those who have always had the distinction. But the trend of this specific color perception across cultures and time remains strong in the data.

Russia, is not the only place with different names for light and dark blue. Greek, Turkish and many others also delineate the darker from the lighter hues of blue.

Greece

Color perception and categorization can also change over the course of a lifetime. Greeks who have two terms for light or dark blue, “ghalazio” and “ble,” were studied after living a long time in the UK. At that point, they were prone to see those two colors as more similar than previously. [panos] Ate everyday exposure to the new linguistic environment, their brains actually started interpreting those colors to be more similar.

The ancient Greeks and distinct in their connections made amongst colors, music, planets, and days of the week (7 of each.) Aristotle also listed seven colors: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Before the year 1500, a word for orange was not found to be recorded, but was referred to as “yellow-red.”. When orange trees were brought from Asia, this color became more distinguished and thus orange was born.

What about Rainbows?

By the 1600s, physicist Sir Isaac Newton from England intentionally continued the auspicious theme of sevens, listing the rainbow as the well-known red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. During this time of the 17th & 18th centuries, seven was a highly auspicious number. Already music was cut into seven tones, and categorists would like to keep with the archetypes. (Indigo, which most people today would have a hard time identifying, was probably Newton’s name for what we would now call deep blue; Newton’s blue might have been what we would now call a lighter cyan.)

Indeed the ROYGBIV division of the rainbow is arbitrary, and many a school child has wondered about the distinction between blue, indigo, and violet. Also note that indigo and violet, like the tribal languages and the addition of “orange” simply adopt the names of descriptive objects, violet and indigo being the pigments of flowers. Some people simply distinguish colors differently than others, as also evidenced by color-blindness being somewhat spectral in effect (i.e. not just on or off, but a variety of degrees of severity).

Dividing the Rainbow and Color-Basic Terms (CBTs)

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969) introduced CBTs, color basic terms, based on the tendency to always introduce color terms in a certain order. They surveyed 100 languages and found striking similarities in following this predictable hierarchy.
Here are the rules:

“All languages contain terms for black and white.
If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.” [B&K]

Five out of 6 languages surveyed in the World Color survey followed the above regime, but this still leaves plenty of others with different routes.

Crayola World – A Digital Perspective

Some researchers used algorithms, asking the models to make the most descriptive delineations under the conditions of only having 2, 3, or 5 options, for example. Their models showed that this is probably he driver for the way the basic color terms are introduced into language.

Researcher Skelton ran tests with 4-6 month old babies to see how ingrained the color delineation is. The small humans did group coulors into discrete sets. And like many of the cultures studied, they by and large had five categories: red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. [pnas] Another study in Japan took data on looked at blood flow in the brain, rather than attentiveness, to also show that babies distinguish between green and blue. [yomiuri]

Nicola Jones of Atmost.earth notes “It’s really only in an industrial society with manufactured objects that you’ll find several things that are identical except for color (like cars or T-shirts), thus requiring a color word to distinguish between them.” [atmos]

English color map from results of the XKCD Color Survey. Randall Munroe.

The Final Verdict: Our Frameworks Determine Color Perception Across Cultures

how many color 4 cones perception — How many colors can you count? Try it first. This is a well-known test for tetrachromacy, the existence of four color cones, although you can’t really test for this over a computer screen.

I personally, for as long as I could remember, always saw colors as something that could be described further and further. For example, if you are asking me just which jar to grab, “the red one,” if there are no other red ones. But if you ask me what color of a dress I would like for an occasion, I could go on for sentences and sentences, since the exact hue matters. For example, in the same red category, I could go on indefinitely “a slightly muted red, not as dark as crimson, not as orange as brick, not as bright as poinsettia, but still vibrant enough to catch the ee. And this red that I’m imagining is not on that spectrum of 39 colors. (Yes, there’s your answer.)

See The Eye of the Beholder: Color Perception Across Cultures

Perception of Color Limited by Language and Exposure, or Vice-Versa?

A Sea the Color of Wine: Color Perception Across Culture and Time