This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 5: Colour words around the world and inside your brain. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 5 shownotes page.

[Theme music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: and I’m Gretchen McCulloch. And today we’re going to be talking about colour. But first! I want to point out that all the transcripts for previous episodes are now online so you can check those out. 

Also: Lauren, what have you been up to lately?

Lauren: I have been in the world of gesture and the world of language data archiving. I’ve been at iGesto conference in Porto in Portugal, which was a delightful place for a delightful conference. And I’ve been archiving language data with a couple of projects, one of which is super exciting and I don’t want to be one of those people that holds exciting projects over people’s heads, but I’ve been doing some work with 1970s data recordings that’s pretty cool and coming along nicely. And of course getting my own data into an archive that will be accessible for other people to look at whether they’re speakers of the language or interested in the language or want to do linguistics on it. So that’s been my month, how are you?

Gretchen: I had a pretty quiet month but at the end of February I’m heading to ICLDC which is the international conference on language documentation and conservation in Hawaii.

Lauren: I’m so jealous! I say, having just come back from Porto.

Gretchen: I am really excited because I’ve been hearing about the conference for years and I have not made it yet. So this is an international conference about language revitalization and I’m going to be running some workshops on getting your language information on Wikipedia and I’m also really excited to learn more about what other people’s projects are that they’re working on.

Lauren: Awesome. I’m so excited that LingWiki, the linguistics Wikipedia editing thing is having a season in Hawaii The ICLDC conference is so great it has such a good community and I’m sure ICLDC7 will be a hashtag with lots of action on it in late January early March. [Update: the hashtag is actually ICLDC5.]

Gretchen: Yeah, so check out the hashtag, we’ll try to tweet something about that, I’m sure I’ll be tweeting from my own twitter account on that hashtag. I don’t know how much people use hashtags at gesture conferences so maybe check out Lauren’s.

Lauren: Lots.

Gretchen: Oh good! OK good, you just have to take photos of the gestures.

Lauren: Yeah, I’ll add a link in the show notes as well to the iGesto hashtags. That’s what Twitter photos are for.

Gretchen: Ahhh photos, I forgot about photos.

[Theme music]

Lauren: I am so excited that today’s topic is colour and language! You may be wondering why we would be interested in talking about colour and language at the same time and that is for a number of reasons.

If you take a cross-linguistic perspective you find that there are a variety of ways in which different languages cut up the colour space in order to talk about them, that has some really interesting implications.

Gretchen: Yeah, so I guess the simple reason is colours are things that we have words for! But not all languages have the same words for the same colours, so you have a potential visual spectrum of possible colours that exists and languages that carve up that visual spectrum in some ways that are similar in some ways that are different. Lauren, you have a story for us.

Lauren: I have, conveniently, two languages that I’ve learnt at two point in my life illustrate this really neatly. 

When I was in primary school we were “taught” - I’ll put that in some quote marks - Italian and I still remember in grade five or six you had to describe a face and I wrote, and and this will probably not be grammatical Italian because I’m remembering what eleven-year-old Lauren knew, but I wrote something like “occhi blu”, so that person has blue eyes, “blu” being the Italian word for blue. And my Italian teacher was like “meeeeh that’s a fine… I mean, I understand what you mean but the person actually has occhi azzurro”. Or there’s probably an adjective conjugation there that I need to do that I haven’t done but for eyes for this Italian teacher you don’t use the word ‘blu’ you use the word 'azzurro’. 

And people have argued that Italian actually has two basic colour words for what we think of as blue and 'blu’ covers everything that’s like royal blue and really rich blues and darker and azzurro is like light blue and sky blue. So I didn’t really get it as an eleven-year-old and it’s still hard for me to think of this, but then when I started learning Yolmo, which is a Tibetan language spoken in Nepal, they have one word for blue but that word also includes most of what we think of as green. And this is sufficiently common it’s not that unusual for languages to have one word that covers everything we describe as blue and green and it’s so common that these are often referred to as languages that have a colour 'grue’, which is the word I like very much.

Gretchen: “Grue” is a portmanteau of 'green’ and 'blue’, in case anyone needed that explained to them.

Lauren: Thanks for explaining that, I think it’s good that you’ve explained it. So you have Italian which creates divisions across what we think of as one colour and a language like Yolmo which covers what we think of as two colours with one word and this is something that happens pretty commonly across the world’s languages.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean the the light blue dark/blue things may seem weird to English speakers but if you think of the words for red and pink, where pink is really just a light red and historically English didn’t have a word for pink, you can kind of get a sense of it – imagine if we did the same thing but for blue.

Lauren: Yeah, and people had been aware of these differences across languages but the study that’s often cited as the thing that kicked off a consistent research agenda in colour terms across languages is a study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay from the 1970s. Oh, it was actually published in 1969, their monograph. So this was research done in the late sixties and then was really popular and replicated and discussed a lot in the seventies and eighties.

Gretchen: I think they did a second study in the seventies and eighties, they did it again, but more broadly. So the bigger one that they get cited on is from the seventies. Anyway, so they decided that they wanted to, the first pilot version of the sixties they got some people or so who spoke some languages that they knew, you kind of wander around your linguistics grad department, find people who speak different languages and ask them about their colour terms. And then they replicated that on a larger scale by sending people out or working with people who are already going out and doing linguistic fieldwork and giving them the box of coloured chips, like paint chips that you get in a store to match your colours and giving them these typewritten instructions. We’ll link to those in the show notes if you want to see the original instructions that they send out to people.

Lauren: And the colour chips that they used specifically known as Munsell chips which doesn’t sound very tasty but the thing that’s important about Munsell chips is that they are produced with incredibly consistent colours. So whatever is Munsell color 42 is going to be exactly the same across all of the Munsell set so you have this real consistency in the colours they were questioning people about across languages.

Gretchen: Yeah, so they sent out people with all these consistent colour chips and they asked them, okay can you get some people who speak whatever language you’re working with to sort these chips by groups that all belong to the same colour and by the most basic colour terms? So in English terms you’d be sorting out things like red and blue and even pink but you wouldn’t be sorting out sky blue which is a colour term that has a literal word attached to it or bright red vs. dark red. So they were trying to get people to avoid using extra descriptors and just use whatever the most basic set of colour terms was that that language had.

Lauren: So English has eleven colour terms I think. Let me see; red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, grey - I’ve only got up to nine, maybe I meant 9.

Gretchen: I think it has 11.

Lauren: I missed black and white! There we go.

Gretchen: There we go!

Lauren: Black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, pink, purple, orange, grey. That is actually cross linguistically quite a lot of words, but we can make even broader distinctions if we talk about light blue/ dark blue, warm yellow/cool yellow, off white - these kind of extra descriptors.

Gretchen: Yeah and there are a few languages that have more distinctions, Korean apparently has a distinction between yellow and greenish-yellow, which is I think uncommon cross-linguistically, but they do it. It’s a little bit weird the fact that English has words for purple and violet which generally people consider basically the same colour, but we do have two quote unquote “basic” colour terms for it.

Lauren: There are also a variety of terms like violet and turquoise and sienna for example, which are considered to not be basics because they’re not part of the basic vocabulary that is taught to children, they’re more technical terms. They’re generally terms from a specific thing so turquoise has that colour because of the colour of turquoise or amethyst you could say that’s a nice - I would never say - that’s a nice amethyst sweater, but if you wanted to you could, it would be grammatical but it’s an extension of the meaning of the colour purple from that stone and it’s a sub colour within purple.

Gretchen: But if you look back historically some words that we now consider basic English colours at one point were words that were used to refer to a specific object. I’m harping on pink a lot but the word pink originally meant a particular type of flower, a kind of a carnation and was later extended to mean the colour. The word orange started out as the fruit and then became the word for the colour. Even like a word like black in English which is a very basic colour term originally come from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning 'burnt’ so you can make these etymological links. I guess it’s when speakers become unaware of the etymological links that they really become basic colour terms.

Lauren: It blew my mind in undergrad when I learnt that black is historically cognate with a lot of the European terms for white so in other Germanic languages you have something like German 'schwartz’, which I definitely didn’t say right, and then in all the Italian, French, Spanish languages you have was like “bianco”, “blanc” or something like that which is cognate with black because black means something that’s like burnt or brightly lit.

Gretchen: Burnt up versus burning brightly.

Lauren: Burnt up, there you go. So these terms can change and evolve.

Gretchen: English also has words ‘blank’ and ‘blanch’, ‘bleach’, which all come from the same route but refer more to the removing of colour than the the darkening of something, so that’s the connection there. And this is one of the things, so what this Kay and Berlin colours survey found is that languages differ with how many basic colour terms they have, somewhere between about 2 and about 12 and that they need to follow at least an approximate trajectory. They have a specified quite a specific path but later research has shown that there are a few more divergences then they noticed. 

So if a language only has two colour terms they’re going to have terms for light and dark.

Lauren: I mean it’s hard to imagine as an English speaker speaking a language that only has two colour terms. Generally they cover a pretty broad spectrum, so it’s not just dark and light it’s like the dark and cool colours and these are the light and warm colours. But that’s your most minimal set of colour terms.

Gretchen: Yeah, and then if you get an additional colour term in that, number three, you’re going to end up with kind of the red spectrum, all of the stuff around red so now you have light and dark and red as a distinct thing and then after that things diverge a bit more. Sometimes people’s fourth colour is yellow, sometimes it’s a green, but those are yellows and greens that also include stuff like blue because remember all the languages that don’t split up green and blue. But probably mostly light blues because your dark blues would still end up with black in the dark spectrum.

Lauren: And then once you have green and yellow you generally have blue, and after that brown follows and then stage 7 is purple, pink, orange, or grey. so you get more and more sophisticated and nuanced colour terms.

Gretchen: Yeah, you get finer variations there but it’s hard to imagine there’s language that only has three colour terms and those terms are turquoise, orange, and pink.

Lauren: Yeah because that’s not covering a lot. I mean, it might be covering a lot of the colour space in your wardrobe but not for all speakers.

Gretchen: No orange! Turquoise yes, in my wardrobe.

Lauren: So it’s not surprising that we we’re talking about pink and orange and these later stage colours in English have really clear and relatively recent etymologies compared to something like red or green or white. I remember when I learned this stuff in undergrad a friend who I was doing this with was completely– she just would not believe that you could cover brown, purple, and grey in one colour. She was just like how could you have one lexeme or one word that covers all of those three?? And then one day she came to class and she was so excited and was just like look look at the scarf that I bought! And it was true, you couldn’t tell, in certain contexts it looked brown and some context it looked purple and in some contexts it looked grey and that was her, like, theoretical proof those colours were close enough that it made sense to put them in one lexeme.

Gretchen: Well the scarf actually brings us into an interesting point about why languages developed colour terms, which is that there’s often some relationship between produced goods whether that’s dyed fabrics or gemstones or other types of processed goods that people make into specific colours. Because if you’re thinking about the sky for example, you know, we say all the time the sky is blue, but it’s really not necessary to specify that the sky is blue. You can say the sky is dark or light, the sky is cloudy or clear, and if it’s clear and its light of course it’s blue! What other colour is it going to be? Or you can say something like the tree is living or the tree is dying, you don’t necessarily need to specify the tree is is green or that it’s red. So a lot of colours in nature a lot of things only really come in one specific colour. Whereas once you start making cars you don’t say this car is ripe or it’s not ripe, or this car is cloudy or it’s clear, or this dress that you’re going to make is ripe or unripe or that this basket that you’re weaving is dyed a particular colour. Once you start dying stuff in colours it becomes more useful to talk about a finer variations or if you send someone to buy for you a particular thing in particular colour may want to specify exactly what that colours going be once you start colouring stuff artificially.

Lauren: So certain technological innovations can give rise to the necessity for finer distinctions and colour terms.

Gretchen: And some colour terms are etymologically linked to specific things that created those colours so purple is linked to the name of the particular mollusc that was used to make purple dye back around ancient Greece.

Lauren: The original Berlin and Kay survey has grown because it was really well written as methodology and using the Munsell chips meant that lots of people could get these colour sets and go and test with lots of different people around the world. The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures has a map about the number of colour terms across a large number of languages. They currently have 119 languages in WALS. I don’t think we’ve talked about WALS on the podcast yet somehow.

Gretchen: No, so WALS is an acronym for the World Atlas of Linguistic Structure and it is a very cool website you can go look at it yourself at wals dot info, we’ll link to that in the description. And you can check out all of these cool maps of different linguistic features as dots on a particular map so in this case you can look at a map that has the red dots as the languages with this many colour terms and the yellow dots as languages with a different number of colour terms and you get kind of a view at a glance. I will say WALS is great and it’s a good resource, it’s got often a couple hundred languages for a particular feature, but it doesn’t have all the languages. There are like 6,000 languages and many of them just don’t have the kind of grammars–

Lauren: But it’s as comprehensive as we’ve got.

Gretchen: Yeah, many of them just don’t have the kind of grammars that can be used as input to databases like WALS. So it’s very cool resource but it obviously over-represents the languages that we have grammatical descriptions of.

Lauren: So there’s lots of data on WALS for South American, Central American and kind of central West Africa and Australia and Papua New Guinea for colour terms. And interestingly, the lowest number of colour terms in a language in the WALS survey is three for basic colour terms. Languages with only three include Murrinh-patha in the Northern Territory of Australia, a number of West African languages including Wobe and Dan and then only one that I can see in Southern America which is Campa. I will put a link to the WALS colour maps in the show notes, so you can have a click around on the map and look at all the languages and the distribution of colour terms there.

Gretchen: I will say that on the one hand it’s very cool that the Kay and Berlin survey has this very standardized side of chips and does allow you to do these cross-linguistic comparisons. But when we were doing some research for this episode, I also came across a paper that pointed out that it can be also useful to look at the colour terms for language in terms of how those group use them specifically to refer to natural objects, sometimes this can illuminate stuff that the very standardized qualitative approach doesn’t illuminate. The example that they had was there was a language that made a distinction between light and dark or black and white and then also between reddish-brown and pale green, you think huh that’s a bit of a weird distinction to make, maybe, but if you look at how they actually use the words the pale green group was for living, growing things and often wet things, and the reddish-brown group with for dry or desiccated or dying things. So if you cut a stalk of bamboo off and you saw that wet opening of the raw bamboo, that was considered the pale green colour, even though literally speaking it’s brown. Whereas if you have a dry leaf which might be the same shade of brown, that’s considered the reddish brown colour. So there are pros and cons to doing a very standardized approach I guess.

Lauren: Yep and one thing people have criticized it for is this lack of cultural context and specific conversational context. Another thing that’s worth talking about in relation to colour terms and how people use language to describe colour is that there aren’t just differences across languages, there are also some differences within a language with different groups. There’s been a variety of studies looking at this, but we just thought we’d talk about some of the ones we know and find interesting and worth talking about. Some of the first effects that we see is an effect of gender and there’s a really great study here from 1977 by Elaine Rich on sex-related differences in colour vocabulary, in which she finds that there is a difference between men and women in terms of how large their colour vocabularies are. Do you want to guess which way that effect goes Gretchen? 

Gretchen: I think if you’re going to get me to guess that means you’re setting me up for something. So generally people assume that women have a larger colour vocabulary than men, are you going to tell me that’s not the case?

Lauren: I’m going to tell you it’s the case in this study but there are some other factors involved as well. So in the survey that the researcher did which involved a set of 25 colour cards – I love it, she used the Crayola crayon colours as her focal colours because she wasn’t using Munsell chips. And then she surveyed a variety of groups of people and she found that women could use more and more elaborate colour vocabularies than men but there were other complicated factors involved. So for example there was a social class difference and there’s also an age difference, so younger men have larger colour vocabularies than older men in her study.

Gretchen: What was the social class difference?

Lauren: The social class was technical vs non technical jobs for younger women in the demographic. She doesn’t actually define what a technical job is as far as I can see but there was a professional distinction there. So one of her groups that she studied were a group of Catholic nuns, and these women did score lower in the number of colour terms they used than the other women in her survey. So even within languages there are different factors that indicate how many colour terms a person might use even if the language has a variety of them.

Gretchen: I came across the study of I think it was women in Eastern Europe where the age effect that they found was the opposite. The older women had more colour terms and specifically the older women had more colour terms related to traditional dying methodology for textiles, whereas the younger women had become disconnected from traditional dyeing terminology for textiles and could no longer identify words like madder and russet and stuff like this that are used in traditional terms – they tended to use more industrialised colour terms. There’s the famous London cab drivers study which shows that people who have been driving cabs in London for years and years and years and learned all of the little byways in London have developed a really good sense of direction for London, they’ve got larger hippocampi to give you directions. And I think this seems to be one of those “if you use it you get more words for it” areas, like with any specialised domain.

Lauren: Yeah, there’s a professional vocabulary distinction to be made there as well. I do remember reading something, and again we’re into uncited anec-data here, but I do remember reading something that said professionals can discriminate with more lexical items and words, like technical words, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they see more colours than people who don’t have these professional words. So you might give people colour chips and one is magenta and one is russet, and people might say well they’re both within red. And someone who does fabric work will know that’s magenta and that’s russet someone who doesn’t have to discriminate will be like well this one’s rustier and this one’s richer red, and so they can still see the difference. It’s not like not having the word prevents you. 

And you know, people who I’m friends with in Nepal who predominantly speak a language that doesn’t have a blue-green distinction, they still see the distinction, they still prefer fabric in one colour over another one. So we’re not saying anything about it affecting the way people literally see colour. I’m also going to put a link in the show notes to Randall Munroe of XKCD’s colour survey from 2010. Results relatively similar to those found by Rich in the seventies except he had a few more data points. He had people labelling colours on their computers, so there’s a monitor effect here, but he had almost a quarter of a million users logged on to label five million colours. So a few more data points there. There’s more distinction for some colours among people who have identified in the survey as female compared to those who identify as male. It was the same set of focus colours though, so you know everyone agreed that red was red and pink was pink in the brightest shades of those, and everyone agreed that no one can spell 'fuchsia’. So it was a pretty successful study.

Gretchen: That’s a good thing to be aware of, I can’t spell fuchsia.

Lauren: I cannot spell fuchsia. So I’ll put a link to those in the note as well. [Update: thanks to spellcheck for spelling fuchsia for us in the transcript!]

Gretchen: There’s also been an interesting post by Kory Stamper on her blog. She’s an editor at Merriam Webster, and the post is talking about the history of defining colour terms in the dictionary. Because especially before we had computers, when you’re making a paper dictionary of course it’s going to be printed in black and white. You can’t just define a colour the way an interior designer might with like “here’s your swatch.” You have to give some sort of a description. For complex colour terms, like fuchsia or magenta, this is easier to do – you can say it’s a dark pink or you can say it’s a pinkish red or something like this. But for simple colour terms, how do you define 'red’? That’s a more difficult task. So she has a post about the history of coming up with either very eloquent literary definitions or very technical definitions and some of the difficulties that editors at Merriam Webster have come up with in terms of defining colour terms.

Lauren: There are another group of people who have an effect when it comes to learning language and those people are children.

Gretchen: Here’s a fun experiment to do if you have a child or you know a child – it’s asking what some colours are! Because kids are actually quite bad at colours, a lot of them are really terrible at them. So this one paper that I was reading said by two years children can generally learn a “highly imaginable concrete noun” from a single exposure but they’re still making colour errors at age six. So colours are not as easy to learn as 'this is a dog’.

Lauren: Right so you can show them something that they’ve never seen before and be like 'hey kid this is a blerg’.

Gretchen: And they’ll learn the word 'blerg’.

Lauren: And then two weeks later you can be like 'go get that blerg for me’ and they’ll know exactly what that is. But you can say to a child what colour’s that very purple looking dress over there and they’ll be like 'pink?’.

Gretchen: Blue?! Yeah, and they’re aware that colour words exist. If you ask them to list how many colour words they know, they can list you some that they then can’t identify or can’t identify correctly. This other thing that the paper showed was that they compared two populations of children, I think it was one English-speaking or Western group of kids that got a lot of explicit colour instruction with a lot of exclusive colour terms, and the other one with a group of kids that weren’t getting this kind of instruction – I forgot what language they were speaking – and they made the same number of errors at age six. They were still having problems regardless of whether they’ve been getting, like, three years of intensive instruction in colours in preschool or whether they were not really getting any colour instruction at all.

Lauren: Right, ok, so children are bad at colour.

Gretchen: Which is weird considering how good children are a lot of other stuff in language.

Lauren: Yeah. I did not know that, this is a thing I learnt.

Gretchen: They’re doing complicated verb tenses before they’re doing colours.

Lauren: Well, the other thing is even adults sometimes disagree about colours. If you ever want to have some fun with adults, get an ambiguously coloured scarf or something, and ask people whether it’s fuchsia or whether it’s magenta or whether it’s maroon. I’m sure I could have had my friend tearing the classroom apart with her grey-brown-purple scarf.

Gretchen: Yeah, or whether something’s turquoise or teal or if it’s turquoise is it more blue or more green.

Lauren: We have this problem in my family because I have a dress that used to be my mother’s, and my mother constantly refers to 'the red dress’ and my sister and I both know it as the ‘salmon’ or the ‘pink’ dress it’s a very very rich pink, but it is definitely pink. And it really weirds me out because my mom is an art teacher, like I just feel like if someone should be able to know the cutoff between red and really dark pink… and I just wonder are we seeing the world the same way, like where does her red stop? I need to get a set of Munsell chips and test my mother.

Gretchen: Yeah you do I mean but maybe she has a different cut off point for for where the colours are, like people disagree about this stuff. And I think that this is one of the things that Kory Stamper noted in the dictionary post is that even when you can pin down a bunch of descriptive terms for colour, some people will disagree about “is fuchsia redder than magenta or is magenta redder than fuchsia?” something like that.

Lauren: Yeah or my mum is just wrong is the other obvious possibility.

Gretchen: I mean she’s your mother that makes her wrong, right?.

Lauren: It’s a really nice dress, thanks for the dress mum.

Gretchen: But I think these are legitimate areas where people can disagree. One area where you can see that English speakers have changed our conceptions of what we think of as belonging to specific colour boundaries is in what we think of as red. So a lot of people wonder, “Why do we call people redheads?” or “Why do we call hair red when really this is an orange coloured hair?” and the thing is is that there have been English speakers with orange coloured hair, with this particular coloured hair, for much longer than English has had a word for orange.

Lauren: Ahhh that’s why that is.

Gretchen: Yeah, so initially English doesn’t have a word for orange. The word for orange gets introduced somewhere in Middle English. When the first oranges start arriving from warmer climates, of course oranges don’t grow in England, up until that point there hadn’t been a word for the colour. And then when the food gets introduced suddenly there’s this very salient thing in a colour that is very specific. The Anglo-Saxons had a few words like “yellow-red”, which was kind of a yellow red colour and “saffron” but they mostly talked about it as red and the orange is responsible in the introduction of that colour and 'redhead’ stuck around as a fossilised term from before we needed a distinction between those colours. 

And you might wonder, well, why don’t we use a different vegetable that is also orange instead of oranges? Surely oranges are kind of far removed from England. But in fact, if you think of other salient orange fruits and vegetables, carrots for example originally came in a bunch of colours so you could get carrots in purple, you could get carrots in yellow, you get carrots in orange, and you can still get these at a farmers market or something but they’re a bit more obscure. So carrots are not that useful as a reference term for particular colour because how do you know if you’re talking about purple or you’re talking about orange? And pumpkins are a New World vegetable, they’re from the Americas, and so they were introduced even later than the orange was.

Lauren: Because “orange” has really swept Europe. You look at your European languages and the word for the colour orange is often the same as that fruit and that’s because when oranges arrived people were really like this is the thing with this colour that we haven’t really lexically pinned down in our languages before. Which really, it always does my head in when I hear this because I just think of oranges such a basic colour.

Gretchen: Yeah it seems really basic to us but if you think about what kinds of objects they had around them then, you had kind of yellows and browns that you can make easily with plant dyes but there weren’t a lot of very orange objects so might as well just lump them in with red.

Lauren: We’re not really going to touch on, because you know there’s so much to talk about with colour as a thing, we’re not even kind of touching on the metaphoric extensions that people have for certain colours or the cultural signifiers that certain colours are used as across the world. But one thing I think it’s fun to talk about is the relationship between colour and other senses. So this crops up in a number of things, one thing I want to talk about is a recent study from de Valk and a bunch of the team at the Meaning, Culture and Cognition lab in Radboud University about the relationship between colour and smells. And in this study they looked at Dutch, Thai, and Maniq which is a language spoken by a small hunter-gatherer community in Thailand. So they live in the same kind of similar cultural context to other Thai speakers but they speak a different language and they live as hunter-gatherers. And the difference in how these groups described odours has implications for the colours that they associate with different smells. And the thing I love about this study is that to distribute the odours they literally just put– So they had smells that were very familiar to Dutch speakers and smells that were very familiar to people from Thailand whether they were Thai or Maniq speakers so they had smells for things like red wine or peanut butter or they had smells for things like coconut, or smells that were familiar to both groups like banana. And they put these objects– they just literally put like a banana in a spray bottle and then just sprayed the smell under people’s noses. It was very lo-fi but very effective.

Gretchen: Like a spray bottle with with water or just with air?

Lauren: Just with air and a banana.

Gretchen: Okay! This is great.

Lauren: And so they repeated the experiment with people twice and they did things where they asked people to describe the small and checked with people asking if they knew what the smell was like, what the object was that they were smelling. So there were a few things and what they found was that Dutch speakers usually describe the odour by describing the object so they would say, if we have the banana in the bottle, they’d say 'oh it smells like banana’. Whereas Thai/Maniq speakers would use words that describe the smell quality. They wouldn’t say it smells like a banana, they’d say it smells really sweet. And when people described the odour with an object, so if they said “oh that smells like a banana,” when they had to match the colours to the odours – so that bit was the final condition, they were asked to match colours to the odours – they found that people who used the word for an object to describe the smell would be more likely to use a colour consistently. So if they smelt peanut butter and said “that smells like peanut butter” they’ll be more likely to pick the colour brown whereas if they smelt peanut butter and used a term like “that smelled musty” then they would be less likely to choose a consistent colour.

Gretchen: So mustiness doesn’t necessarily have a consistent colour association, but we know what colour peanuts are and they’re pretty much always the same colour.

Lauren: Yeah so their finding suggests that the odour-colour associations that people have are most likely formed through language. It’s really neat article and they have a great website kind of summarizing the findings, we’ll put that in the show notes.

Gretchen: One thing that interests me about colours and words together is the phenomenon called synesthesia where you have these relationships between different senses. And one of the most common types of synesthesia is what’s called grapheme-colour synesthesia, where you associate certain graphemes - letters and numbers and other types of symbolic shapes - with particular colours. I have this kind of synesthesia, so it always interests me when you find particular research about this and this is not unfortunately an episode where we’re going to talk about all kinds of synesthesia, because that’d be really cool, we should do one of those. But one thing that I find is cool is that there’s sometimes a connection where the colours aren’t evenly distributed. So my particular set of synesthesia is not as if the rainbow just sat down and there’s the alphabet sitting along it. I have, like, more yellow letters then I do purple letters for no particular reason.

Lauren: So every letter of the alphabet has it consistent colour mapping for you.

Gretchen: Yeah, and all the numbers too. And so a lot of early synesthesia research is just focused on establishing that these are consistent, if you bring synesthetes into the lab and you ask them what colour each letter is, and in a year you bring them back and ask them what colour each letter is again, they’ll give you the same answer, whereas for non-synesthetes they’ll be a lot more variable. And this research I find very boring because I already know that my colours are consistent, that they’re there, because of course I’m experiencing them, but this is how you do science I guess. And the later research has been trying to show kind of more complex stuff about it. So this is a specific topic I’d love to see more people research.

Lauren: Ok we’ll do a synesthesia episode at one point then.

Gretchen: Well, one way you can get kind of colour/ letter effects even if you’re not a synesthete is you can do what’s called a Stroop test, and what this is, is that you take a word like green and you write in a colour ink that does not correspond to the actual word. So you write green with, let’s say, red ink. And then you tell people, “Okay, you need to read the colour of the ink not the word.” And people find it really difficult. So you’re seeing green in letters but it’s in red ink and so you have to say red. And we will link to an example of a Stroop test that you can take yourself and see how challenging it is.

Lauren: I am rubbish at them.

Gretchen: Yeah they’re really hard because we get so good at words. They’ve been used in psycholinguistics literature for a bunch of different things.

Lauren: You can also fail at a Stroop test and tell us how badly you did through the link in the show notes page.

Gretchen: Yes! So this has been a lot of colour research. There are more cool studies out there, if you have a favourite colour study or colour research or colour etymology do feel free to let us know!

Lauren: Or colour, if you have a favourite colour.

Gretchen: Yeah! What’s your favourite colour!

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to everything mentioned in this episode go to Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow at Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I can be found at GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com.

Lauren: I tweet at Superlinguo and I blog as Superlinguo as well. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire, and our music is by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic!

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