There Is No “Blue” in Korean

Different Languages Have Different Colors

This fact that Korean has no equivalent to the English word “blue” was part of what motivated me to join Younghoon Kim (first author), Gabriella Silva Gorsky, and Jeffrey Heer on a project investigating how different languages handle colors differently. I’ll explain this fact about “blue" in detail below, but first:

Please consider taking our 12 minute color perception survey before you read the rest of this post (we could always use more data, and reading this post first might influence your answers).

Collecting Color Names

In order to find out how colors vary between languages we created the color perception survey (linked above) on Lab in the Wild. As part of this survey, we ask people to tell us what languages they speak, and we later ask them to name colors in their primary language. We started by only asking people to name random “hue colors.” We used this limited set of colors first since it lets us look for interesting patterns with limited data:

The “hue colors,” that is, the brightest, most saturated colors that can be displayed on computer monitors (basically the rainbow colors + purple).

Once a language got enough data for comparisons with hue colors, we switched that language over to having people name random colors from all possible rgb colors (which we call “full colors”). We can then get data on browns, grays and all other colors for those languages, though we need a lot more color names to do valuable comparisons.

Note: Other projects have collected some color names before ours.

The Color “Blue”

Researchers (and people who know certain languages) already knew that some languages have two separate color names for what in English is one word: “blue.” We can see this in our data by comparing the hue colors for English, Korean and Russian:

Stacked graph showing the divisions of the “blue” hue colors in English, Korean, and Russian. The area above each color swatch square what color names are used for it. The color name areas sizes are proportional to how often the names are used and they areas are colored with the average color given to that color name.

As you can see in the above, the “blue” area in English is used almost to the left end of the graph where the greens are, while in Korean and Russian, the dark blues (“파랑” and “синий”) only extend part way to green, and there is a significant light blue color (“하늘” and “ голубой”) which extends the rest of the way to green.

We can use the full color data we collected to provide another view of the difference between English “blue” and the two Korean blues, this time also including colors that are not full brightness and saturation (e.g., blueish grays):

The color ranges of the English word “blue” and the Korean words “파랑” and “하늘”. We used self-organizing maps based off the full color data to find a representative grid of colors.

Differences in how languages handle blue colors have been shown to influence perception. For example, one study found that Russian speakers were relatively faster at picking out color differences along the синий/голубой (light blue/dark blue) boundary, while English speakers didn’t show this improvement.

English and Korean Divisions of Colors

We collected enough color names to compare the full color range in English and Korean. Doing this let’s us find more differences than just “blue”: