The Color of Language
Every language carves the same physical spectrum — but not at random. Black & white come first, then red, then green and yellow, then blue; brown, grey, orange, purple and pink arrive late, if at all. That sequence is a prediction (Berlin & Kay, 1969) — and it is legible directly in our own coverage of 491 languages. Then comes the second claim: the spectrum has no universal seams — where English insists on a line between blue and green, some languages paint straight across with one word.
Movement 1 · the order
Each step below is one of the eleven basic colours; the bar's width is how many of our 491 languages name it. Read top to bottom and you watch the Berlin & Kay staircase descend — a near-monotone decline from white to purple. Nobody arranged this order; it falls out of the raw coverage.
Movement 2 · where
INVENTORY sizes every dot by how many basic colours that language names — the eye reads the gradient at once. Flip to GRUE and the world dims, leaving lit only the languages where one word does the job of blue AND green.
Babel
The base map couldn’t be fetched. The hierarchy above and the rainbow rows below still work — reload to try the map again.
Movement 3 · one spectrum, many cuts
Click a dot above — or search — and a language’s spectrum unrolls here, sliced into the colour words it actually has. A wide band with a dashed edge is a merge (one word for two English colours); a hatched band means no separate word in the dictionary we drew from. Each term shows its IPA where we have it, and a ▶ only where a recording exists.
No language opened yet — click any dot on the map, or use the search above, to draw its rainbow here.
Babel
Drawing the spectrum…