Why Some Languages Don’t Have a Word for Blue — and What That Reveals About the Human Brain

Why Some Languages Have Fewer Color Words And What That Says About the Human Mind

        If I asked you to name the color of a paint chip, you’d probably answer without hesitation: blue, purple, brown. It feels obvious. Natural. Almost automatic.

    But here’s something surprising: in some languages, all three of those colors would be described using a single word.

    This isn’t because people in those cultures can’t see the difference. It’s because languages don’t all divide color the same way. And the way we name colors reveals something fascinating about how the human brain makes sense of the world.

How Many Colors Does a Language Really Have?

        In English, we have 11 basic color terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray.
Russian has 12, with an extra distinction between light blue and dark blue.

But some languages have far fewer.

For example, Wobé, a language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire, has only three basic color words. Speakers of Wobé can still see every color on the spectrum — but linguistically, they group many of them together.

Researchers studying languages around the world noticed something even more intriguing:
when a language has only three or four color terms, they are almost always the same ones.

This raised a big question:

Why do languages choose certain colors to name and not others?

 

Color Is a Spectrum, Not a Set of Boxes

        Scientifically speaking, color isn’t made of neat categories. It’s a continuous spectrum of light wavelengths. There’s no obvious boundary where “green” ends and “blue” begins.

So for a long time, anthropologists believed that cultures simply picked color categories randomly.

That idea changed dramatically in 1969.

The Color Hierarchy Theory That Changed Everything

        Two researchers from the University of California, Berkeley — Paul Kay and Brent Berlin — challenged the idea that color naming is random.

    They asked speakers of different languages to label 330 standardized color chips using their language’s most basic color words.

What they found was startlingly consistent.

The Universal Order of Color Words

According to their research:

        -Languages with two colors always have words for black (dark) and white (light)

        -If a language has three, it adds red

        -With four, it adds green or yellow

        -With five or six, it includes both green and yellow

        -Blue comes next

        -Later additions include brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray

This suggested that as languages evolve, they develop color words in a predictable order, not at random.

Ancient Texts and the “Missing” Color Blue

        Interestingly, this idea wasn’t entirely new.

    In 1858, William Gladstone, who would later become Prime Minister of Britain, noticed something strange while studying Homer’s ancient Greek texts.

    Homer rarely mentioned colors — and when he did, he used the same word to describe things we’d consider completely different:

    Blood

    Dark clouds

    The sea

    Rainbows

Most famously, Homer described the sea as “wine-dark.”

There were no clear references to blue or orange.

Some scholars wrongly concluded that ancient people might have been colorblind — a claim we now know is false. The real difference wasn’t vision, but language.

When Color Research Took a Dark Turn

        In the late 19th century, anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers studied communities in Papua New Guinea. He found that some groups used only three color words: red, white, and black.

    Unfortunately, Rivers used this data to argue that these societies were less intellectually evolved — a deeply racist and incorrect conclusion.

    Modern science strongly rejects this idea. Fewer color words do not mean reduced intelligence or perception.

Why Some Languages Don’t Fit the Color Chip Test

Critics of Berlin and Kay pointed out real problems with their early work:

        Small sample size

        Mostly bilingual speakers

        Languages from industrialized societies

They also highlighted languages that don’t treat color as a standalone concept.

Examples:

    Yele (Papua New Guinea): Only three basic color words, but dozens of object-based comparisons like sky, ashes, or tree sap.

    Hanunó’o (Philippines): Color words combine light vs. dark, strength vs. weakness, and wetness vs. dryness.

These systems don’t map neatly onto a color chart — but they’re incredibly expressive.

The World Color Survey: A Bigger Test

To address criticism, Berlin and Kay launched the World Color Survey in the late 1970s.

        2,600 native speakers

        110 unwritten languages

        Mostly non-industrial societies

The results?

        83% of languages still fit the original color hierarchy

        When researchers averaged how speakers labeled colors, the results formed clusters

        Those clusters closely matched English color categories

As Paul Kay put it:

“Most languages make cuts in the same place. Some languages just make fewer cuts.”

Why Does Red Come Before Blue?

One of the biggest mysteries remains: why this order?

A leading theory is environmental salience.

    Red is everywhere in nature: blood, fire, soil

    Blue was relatively rare before dyes and manufacturing

More recently, cognitive scientists used computer simulations to study how color language evolves.

Artificial agents, through simple conversations, developed shared color labels — and the order matched real languages:

1. Reddish tones

2. Green and yellow

3. Blue

4. Orange

This suggests the hierarchy isn’t cultural accident — it’s tied to how distinct colors are to the human brain.

What This Tells Us About Humanity

        Despite vast cultural differences, humans seem to organize the world in remarkably similar ways.

    Languages may vary. Color words may differ. But beneath it all, there’s something deeply universal about how we:

    -Perceive

    -Categorize

    -Communicate meaning

Color isn’t just about what we see — it’s about how we think.