Colour and language
Russian's two blues
Russian has separate basic words for light blue and dark blue. Speakers are a touch faster at telling the two apart.
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Russian has no single word for blue. Light blue is goluboy and dark blue is siniy, and to a Russian speaker they are as distinct as pink and red are in English. A well-known experiment in 2007 found that this affects how quickly Russian speakers tell blues apart. It is one of the clearest examples of language nudging perception, and the nudge is small.
Two words, not one
English speakers call pink a colour in its own right although it is light red. Russian does the same for blue. A child learns goluboy for the sky and siniy for a dark ink or the deep sea, and has no everyday word that covers both. Russian is not alone. Greek separates ghalazio from ble, Italian has azzurro and blu, and Turkish has mavi and the darker lacivert. In the Berlin and Kay scheme this gives Russian twelve basic colour terms where English has eleven.
The 2007 experiment
Jonathan Winawer and colleagues, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed Russian and English speakers three blue squares and asked which of the lower two matched the top one. Russian speakers answered faster when the two candidates fell on opposite sides of the goluboy and siniy border than when both fell on the same side. English speakers showed no such difference. When the Russian speakers had to repeat a string of numbers in their heads at the same time, the advantage vanished, which suggests the words themselves were doing the work.
How much to make of it
The effect is measured in fractions of a second. Russian speakers do not see more blues than anyone else, and English speakers can tell the same shades apart with ease. What the study shows is that a word boundary gives a small boost to quick decisions near that boundary. Similar results have been found for other languages and colours. This is a modest version of the idea that language shapes thought: names act as handy labels that help the mind sort what the eyes have already seen.
Colours on this page
Sources and further reading
- Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate on Wikipedia
- Winawer and others, Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination, PNAS (2007)
- Nature News: Seeing the blues
Original text by the EveryRang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.