Definition of colours.

There are thousands of scripted and non- scripted languages in the world. Not only these languages have different words for different colors,
but also different number of basic colour categories. For example, an English speaker would categorize the following colors as blue, purple and brown respectively.













But if your native language is wobé, you probably would use only one word for all these – Kpe.

In English we have 11 color categories, Russian has 12, but some languages like wobé have only three.

Categories in wobe are only three. – Kyp [meaning dark], pluu [meaning light] and sain [meaning red].

Researchers have found that if a language has three or four color categories, they can easily predict what they would be.

It’s a question that which color will be named at all.

Color doesn’t exist in categories but in a spectrum and earlier it was believed that cultures world just randomly choose from spectrum and name them.

In 1969 two researchers Paul Kay and Brent Berlin asked 20 people from different cultures to look at a spectrum and name the colors.

If a language had 6 color terms (like mandarin), the terms were for black, white, red, green, yellow and blue.

If there were 4 terms (like Ibibio), the terms were for black, white, red, green.

If there were 3 terms (like pomo or wobe), the terms were for black, white and red.

Turns out the languages always named color categories in a particular order.

First black and white> than red> than green and yellow> than blue> brown >others like purple/grey/orange/pink.

Ancient Greek writing do not have referances to some colors like purple and orange. This was used by some societies to wrongly speculate that ancient people were colorblind. Some explorers claimed that, the less the no. of color categories defined shows the ‘less intellectual and cultural development’ of the people of that culture.

These claims were however wrong. For example, in the yele language in Papua New Guinea, though there are only three basic color terms for black, white and red but there is a broad vocabulary of everyday objects like ash, sky and tree bark to signify different coloured objects.