The language condition of words is the way people know and understand the world around them. Growing up in a certain place, with a certain climate, leads to the adaptation of that language to the environment, but, at the same time, to recognize the environment thanks to the language and the constant interaction between them.

He same thing happens with color. Depending on the name used to describe it, a greater variety of pitch and subtones may or may not be appreciated, despite the fact that the human eye is able to distinguish them perfectly.

Language-based color perception allows some people to perceive lighter colors, others warmer colors, and others to be able to distinguish between each, allowing people understand it differently, according to how they are defined by their languagea.

In this way, although most see the same color, the way to describe or communicate it ultimately becomes different. This is caused by number of categories and expressions where every language or culture is relied on to describe color.

Perception, language and color

It anthropologist Brent Berlin you Paul Kay in 1969 they dedicated themselves to learning the words that at least one hundred languages ​​in the world have for color. Among their results, they observed that colored terms are not arbitrarily distributed among languages ​​and there is more hierarchy.

Along these lines, they discovered that if there were only two ways to express color, then they will only be black and whiteif there are three, red is added, and if there are five shapes, green and yellow are already defined, in ascending order.

Meanwhile, anthropologists highlight that various cultures in Liberia or Sierra Leone in their language only have two terms to define all colors: dark and warm. In contrast, cultures in northern Australia have no way of naming colours, but instead name them based on their texture or sensation thanks to the many concepts in their language.

Investigations like this one show how there are basic colors in the world to designate all existing ranges namely: white, black, blue, yellow, green and red.

Berlin and Kay in their study exemplified this theory through what was experienced by a group of Greek-speaking people, where the blue color was determined by the words “ghalazio” and “ble”, but when they lived for a long time in Great Britain. and influenced by his language “become more likely to see these two colors are more similar in that there is only the term blue (blue) to cover the entire range“.

In this regard, there are other examples such as the Inuit language spoken by the Eskimos where there are four different words to describe snow and its colorwhereas in Spanish the word snow covers the whole concept.

However, Spanish has additional words to describe things and thus makes communication efficient. “By placing adjectives, we can distinguish between snow with the same efficiency as Eskimos with a single word,” said the study.