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.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 5: Colour words around the world and inside your brain 

Red, orange, yellow, grue, and purple? Not so fast – while many languages don’t distinguish between green and blue, it’s unlikely that a language would lump these two together while also having distinct words for “orange” and “purple”. 

But how do we know this? What kinds of ways do different languages carve up the colour spectrum? Why does English say “redhead” instead of “orangehead”? How do colour words interact with smells, reading, and the human brain? In episode 5 of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren and Gretchen talk about what linguistic typology and psycholinguistics can tell us about colour words. 

We also chat about Lauren’s archiving work, and the iGesto gesture conference, and Gretchen’s upcoming ICLDC conference adventures.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Basic colour terms (Wikipedia)
  
• XKCD colour survey results
• WALS map of colour terms
  
• Claire Bowen on colour terms, particularly in Australian languages
• Smells can have colours (Lauren’s post)
• We use words to colour our odours (Research team page)
• Blue in Italian (PDF)
• Ancient colour categories (PDF)
• Why red means red in almost every language (Nautilus)
  
• 1972 paper on colour terminology
• Rich’s 1977 colour perception survey
  
• Critique of colour swatches methodology (PDF)
• Kory Stamper on defining colour terms
• Children’s colour term acquisition (PDF)
• An interactive Stroop Effect test
  
• The iGesto conference hashtag (includes many tweets from Lauren)
• Lauren *said* ICLDC7, but she meant ICLDC5 - the 5th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation
  

 Some things we didn’t even get to mention in the episode:

• Is colour perception a universal human experience? (Sapiens)
• ‘Purple Rain’ — As Retold In A Language Without A Word For Purple (via Steph Campisi)
• Language Log on the ongoing debate about the Namibian tribe that reportedly can’t distinguish green and blue
  
• Roses are red / Violets are grue… (tweet poem from Gretchen)

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire Gawne, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).