People of a remote Amazonian society who learned Spanish as a second language began to interpret colors in a new way, anThe human eye can perceive about 1 million colors, but languages have far fewer words to describe those colors. So-called, single color words used frequently by speakers of a given language, are often employed to gauge how languages differ in their handling of color.
In the most striking finding, Tsimane’ who were bilingual began using two different words to describe blue and green, which monolingual Tsimane’ speakers do not typically do. And, instead of borrowing Spanish words for blue and green, they repurposed words from their own language to describe those colors.
“It’s a great example of one of the main benefits of learning a second language, which is that you open a different worldview and different concepts that then you can import to your native language,” says Saima Malik-Moraleda, a graduate student in the Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology Program at Harvard University and the lead author of the study.
As a follow-up to that study, Malik-Moraleda wanted to explore whether learning a second language would have any effect on how the Tsimane’ use color words. Today, many Tsimane’ learn Bolivian Spanish as a second language. The researchers found that when performing this task in Spanish, the bilingual Tsimane’ classified colors into the traditional color words of the Spanish language. Additionally, the bilingual speakers were much more precise about naming colors when they were performed the task in their native language.
“It does seem like the concepts are being borrowed from Spanish,” Gibson says. “The bilingual speakers learn a different way to divide up the color space, which is pretty useful if you’re dealing with the industrialized world. It’s useful to be able to label colors that way, and somehow they import some of that into the Tsimane’ meaning space.”