Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf hypothesized an intriguing idea still debated today. Called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (aka Whorfian hypothesis), it states that language doesn’t just describe reality but shapes how we perceive and think about it. In other words, we don’t experience the world and then find words for it; instead, our language restricts what we’re even capable of noticing, like with color. 

Clever researchers Berlin and Kay tested this hypothesis in 1969 by asking people if they could perceive colors they didn’t have words for in their language. The deliberate use of colors allowed the researchers to separate out the effects that language and culture have on each other. 

The color experiment

Berlin and Kay gave the Munsell array of 329 colors chips to speakers of about 100 different languages.

Munsell color chart. 

First, subjects were asked to draw a circle around a color term’s boundary, i.e., all reds. Next, they were to choose the focal point for any one color they considered the most prototypical examples of a color category (the “best red,” the “best blue”). The goal was to find out whether speakers would classify the chips based on how their language classified them or whether they created categories of color chips even without a one-word color term in their language. 

Results

Even though languages carve up the color spectrum differently (for example, some have one word covering both blue and green), speakers across vastly different languages tended to agree on the focal points, that is, nearly the same “best” red was chosen, for example, by both Xhosa and English speakers. 

This finding means the perception of focal colors has nothing to do with linguistic categories. The speakers aren’t picking the best red because their language trained them to see red. They’re picking it because something in human visual perception makes that particular red the most representative point in that region of the spectrum. 

Basic color terms

Languages differ widely in how many basic color terms they have. When a color term is added to a language, that process follows a predictable hierarchy. So, a language with only two terms will have light and dark (or black and white); if it has three, red is invariably the third; a fourth will be yellow or green; and so on. No language develops a word for blue before it has a word for red. Each additional term is always the next in this universal sequence. 

Below is a table showing the order of colors that languages add. 

The fact that basic colors follow universal patterns across cultures suggests that human biology (not just language) guides color perception. Berlin and Kay concluded that color perception is pre-linguistic, that is, it is grounded in human visual neurology, not vocabulary. This finding in turn makes the Whorfian argument—that vocabulary alone drives cognitive difference—much harder to sustain. 

Incidentally, the order has nothing to do with whether the color is primary vs. secondary. (Primary colors can’t be mixed from others and can be combined to make a wide range of other colors.) Researchers believe that it has more to do with how much the color stands out to the human eye. 

Researchers are still conducting studies in a variety of areas, but the strong version of Whorf’s hypothesis—that our language controls what we can think and see—is largely rejected. The weaker version, which states that language influences how easily we notice certain distinctions,has real experimental support. In sum, language is more of a lens that focuses our attention rather than a cage that limits perception.

Sources:

Algeo, J. , & Butcher, C. A. (2014). The origins and development of the English language (7th ed.). Wadsworth Cengage Learning. 

Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1969). Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. University of California Press.

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McCarthy, A. D., Wu, W., Mueller, A., Watson, B., & Yarowsky, D. (2019). Modeling color terminology across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), 2347–2358. https://aclanthology.org/D19-1229/

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Pyles, T., & Algeo, J. (1993). The origins and development of the English language (4th ed.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 

Sapir, E. (1929). The status of linguistics as a science. Language, 5(4), 207-214. http://www.jstor.org/stable/409588

Williams, J. M. (1986). Origins of the English language: A social and linguistic history. Free Press.

Yule, G. (2020). The study of language (7th ed.). Cambridge.