Why Russians see a different Kind of Blue

Ever since Homer spoke of the “wine-dark” sea (and probably before), we have attributed colours to objects. The bars on the right illustrate the responses of more than 500,000 people to an ongoing online survey asking them to associate colours with words.

Sometimes our colour associations are “diagnostic” – heat being red, for example – but they can also be semantic, a product of culture: we associate red with danger because our society has tended to make warning signs red.

Our response to colour is also partly physiological. Humans are trichromatic, meaning we have three colour receptors: for red, green, and blue. Most other mammals have only two, which, one theory goes, is what helped set man apart: we could more easily distinguish ripe fruit in trees.

An emerging view in scientific literature, however, is that language, as much as anything, shapes the way we perceive colour. Russian, for instance, has two totally separate categories for light and dark blue, and in a remarkable study of native Russian and English speakers in the Sixties, Russians proved more adept at distinguishing different shades of blue – not because of any greater perceptive ability, but because of their mother tongue.