Researchers Are Wrong When They Claim Language Affects Color Perception

I'm of the opinion that it is preferable to state an opinion clearly even when one is not an expert on a subject. It is tempting to hem, haw, and qualify, but this is counterproductive. Formulating and articulating opinions is part of the process of learning. And a claim can be more decisively rebutted when it is stated plainly.

And so I offer my humble opinion on a matter about which I have no business offering an opinion.

The Himba are a pastoral people in Namibia. Numbering between 30,000 and 50,000, they maintain their traditional cultural practices despite pressures from the surrounding, modern world. For instance, Himba women famously cover their bodies with a substance called otjize, which has a reddish color.

The Himba can distinguish between shades of green that English speakers cannot distinguish between. The Himba also have words that refer to these different shades of green.

The conclusion that researchers have drawn is that the Himba are able to perceive different shades of green as a consequence of their language having words for those different shades. And the Himba are just one example. Cultures differ in the shades of colors its members can perceive. And cultures that can perceive a color have a word for that color. This correlation, between the ability of a culture to perceive a color and the presence of a word for that color in that culture’s language, has produced the confused notion that the presence of a color word in a language causes, or at least enables, the speakers of that language to be able to perceive that color. Simply put, language precedes perception.

The relationship between color, language, and perception is fascinating. For instance, color words appear in languages in a set order. Languages that have no other words for color will have words for black and white. In languages that only have one other color word, that color word will refer to red. And so on. Color also shapes our perception of flavor. For instance, people who are given flavorless red Jell-O and flavorless blue Jell-O will perceive both to have a flavor and will prefer the red Jell-O. The subjects in such experiments genuinely perceive the different flavors as a consequence of the presence of color.

But while there are relationships between color, color vocabulary, and perception, the notion that language precedes the perception of colors is untenable.

For one thing, obviously, the mere presence of a color word in one’s vocabulary is insufficient to enable one to distinguish that color from similar colors. I know the word fuchsia, but I couldn’t pick it out. There are many English color words that may be in an English speaker’s vocabulary but which only a relative handful of English speakers could accurately use. For a color word to have meaning, perceptual learning must take place.

And perceptual learning does not require language. Only humans have language and therefore color words, but no one thinks that only humans perceive color. Among humans, infants begin to distinguish colors from each other before they acquire the ability to use language to refer to those colors.

So, why does a culture that lacks a word for a color lack the ability to perceive that color? Because that culture did not invent words for things they can’t perceive.

The way this topic has been framed has mistakenly reversed the causal relationship between language and color perception. Consider how simple the question above is to answer if we modify it just a bit: Why does a culture that can’t perceive a color not have a word for it? Now the answer is obvious. A culture isn’t going to invent a color word for a color it doesn’t know exists.

Cultures differ in the colors they perceive. It would be nice to know why cultures differ in this respect, though it is easy to imagine that many differences are the products of "butterfly effects," minor events lost to history that unpredictably left a lasting legacy on a culture's language. But whatever the causes of these differences in perceptive abilities, the corresponding differences in color vocabulary is best understood as a consequence of these perceptive differences, not their cause.