Color: More Than Meets the Eye Part Four: Color in Culture: How Language Shapes Our Palette

anartistslament
Sep 15, 2025
4 min read

This is the fourth post in a four-part series exploring the fascinating evolution of color theory, language, and perception. In this installment, we examine how different cultures classify, name, and prioritize colors—and how language shapes what we see.

Catch up:

Part One: Which Color Wheel Are You On?
Part Two: Color Names – Why Red Came First (And Cyan Came Later)
Part Three: What Makes a Color “Primary”?
Part Four: Color in Culture – How Language Shapes Our Palette (You’re here!)

In Japanese, the word "ao" once covered both what we would call blue and green. A single word for two colors that, to many of us, feel very distinct. What does that say about how we see the world? It reminds us that the boundaries we draw between colors aren’t universal—they’re cultural, shaped as much by language as by the eye itself.

Language and Color Perception

The Himba people of Namibia are often cited in color perception studies because of their unusual vocabulary for describing hues. Their language historically merged blue and green into a single category—sometimes called “grue”—while offering a rich variety of words for different shades of green. Unsurprisingly, studies found that they could pick out subtle differences between greens much faster than most Western participants, yet they were slower to notice a lone blue square hidden among them. More recent research has complicated this picture, suggesting that the Himba actually have up to seven distinct color categories. Even so, the essential idea remains: the words we have for colors don’t just help us talk about them—they can change how quickly, or even how clearly, we see them.

This connects to what linguists call the Whorfian hypothesis, or linguistic relativity—the suggestion that language can influence thought and perception. It isn’t only the Himba who demonstrate this. Russian, for instance, makes a sharp lexical distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), and Russian speakers tend to recognize differences between shades of blue faster than English speakers, who lump them together. Korean, too, draws finer distinctions than English in certain parts of the spectrum. In other words, the colors we can name may be the colors we see most vividly.

Split image shows a bride in a white gown and a woman in a white shawl. Text: "Wedding," "Funeral," and "White." Contrasting emotions. — Contrasting Moments: This unfinished artwork depicts a woman in a wedding dress and another in funeral attire, capturing the dual symbolism of white.

Color Symbolism Around the World

Language doesn’t just affect which colors we notice—it also shapes what colors mean. Take white, for example. In the West, it often represents purity, innocence, and beginnings. Brides wear white gowns, priests wear white vestments, and snow-white is shorthand for untarnished goodness. In much of East and South Asia, however, white has long been the color of mourning and funerals. There, it represents purity too, but in the sense of finality and release, a stripping away of earthly attachments.

Red is another striking example of cultural contrast. In China, it bursts with life and fortune. Red is the color of weddings, Lunar New Year celebrations, and doorways meant to invite luck. Yet in much of the West, red often signals danger, stop, or warning. It can carry passion and vitality too, but always edged with risk.

Blue, meanwhile, has layers upon layers of meaning. In Jewish tradition, the thread of tekhelet—a sky-blue dye—was a sacred reminder of heaven woven into garments and temple rituals. Elsewhere, blue has been tied to masculinity, protection, or even mourning. Among the Hopi, for instance, blue could represent the direction west and the realm of death. A single color, endless cultural readings.

Text "Mizuiro" in light blue on a dark blue water pattern background. The wavy design evokes a calm, fluid motion. — *Mizuiro* literally means "water color" in Japanese.

Lost in Translation: Unique Color Words

Every language has its untranslatable color words. English has specific but rarely used ones—glaucous for a bluish-gray, chartreuse for a yellow-green. Japanese, meanwhile, offers a whole palette of subtle distinctions: mizuiro (literally “water color”) for a pale, watery blue, or midori for green, which only later became firmly separate from the older, broader ao. These words don’t always map neatly onto English, and the reverse is true as well. This tug-of-war between language and perception reminds us that colors aren’t just wavelengths of light—they’re cultural categories, sharpened or blurred depending on the words we inherit.

Artistic Implications

For artists, designers, and storytellers, this cultural lens on color is more than just an interesting curiosity—it’s a practical reality. A garment dyed indigo in Edo-period Japan carried connotations of class, restraint, and even national identity, since indigo became so tied to the idea of “Japan blue.” In China, the imperial court used colors with strict symbolism, woven into fabrics and ritual art that reinforced hierarchies and cosmic order. Even today, a global brand might use red to inspire excitement in one market and carefully avoid it in another where it may signal danger or misfortune. The palette is never just visual—it’s cultural, and artists ignore that at their peril.

Have you ever traveled or even just stumbled across a situation where a color meant something completely different than what you expected? Maybe a favorite shade was taken as a bad omen, or a color you associated with mourning turned out to be a color of celebration. I’d love to hear your experiences—after all, color only becomes richer when we compare the worlds we see through it.