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The English language makes a distinction between blue and green but some languages do not.

According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange and grey will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction between green and blue. In their account of the development of colour terms the first terms to emerge are those for white/black, red and green/yellow. (Summarised in David Crystal, The Encyclopedia of Language (1997) (p106)).

Contents 1 Vietnamese 2 Chinese 3 Japanese 4 Korean 5 Celtic languages 6 Kurdish, Kazakh and Pashto 7 Zulu 8 Maya 9 Tupian languages 10 See also 11 References

Vietnamese usually does not use separate words for green and refers to that colour using a word that can also refer to blue. In Vietnamese, blue and green are denoted by xanh; blue is specifically described as "xanh like the sky" (xanh da trời) and green as "xanh like the leaves" (xanh lá cây).

The modern Chinese language has the blue-green distinction; however, another word which predates the modern vernacular, qīng (青), is also used. It can refer to either blue or green, or even (though much less frequently) to black, as in xuánqīng (玄青 where 玄 refers to black). For example, the Flag of the Republic of China is today still referred to as qīng tiān, bái rì, mǎn dì hóng ("Blue Sky, White Sun, Whole Field Red" — 青天，白日，满地红); whereas qīng cài (青菜) is the Chinese word for "green vegetable".

The Japanese word ao (青 n., 青い aoi adj.), the same kanji character as the Chinese qīng above, can refer to either blue or green depending on the situation. Modern Japanese also has a word for green (緑 midori), although this was not always so. Ancient Japanese did not have this distinction: the word midori only came into use in the Heian period, and at that time (and for a long time thereafter) midori was still considered a shade of ao. Educational materials distinguishing green and blue only came into use after World War II, during the Occupation: thus, even though most Japanese consider them to be green, the word ao is still used to describe certain vegetables, apples and vegetation. Ao is also the name for the color of a traffic light, "green" in English. However, most other objects—a green car, a green sweater, and so forth—will generally be called midori. Japanese people also sometimes use the English word "green" for colors. The language also has several other words meaning specific shades of green and blue.

The native Korean word '푸르다'(Revised Romanization: pureu-da adj.) may mean either blue or green, or bluish green. This word '푸르다' is used as in '푸른 하늘'(pureun haneul, blue sky) for blue or as in '푸른 숲'(pureun sup, green forest) for green. Distinct words for blue and green are also used; '파란'(paran adj.), '파란색'/'파랑'(paransaek/parang n.) for blue, '초록'(chorok adj./n.), '초록색'(choroksaek n. or for short, '녹색' noksaek n.) for green. Cheong (청) is also used for both blue and green. It is a loan from Chinese (靑, pinyin: qing) and is used in the proper name Cheong Wa Dae (청와대 or Hanja: 靑瓦臺), the Blue House, which is the executive office and official residence of the President of the Republic of Korea.

Welsh has different boundaries than English regarding blue and green. The word glas is usually translated as "blue". It can also refer, variously, to the colour of the sea, of grass, or of silver. The word gwyrdd is the standard translation for "green".

Glas (same spelling) is, comparably, the translation for "green" in Irish and Breton, with specific reference to plant hues of green; other shades would be referred to in Modern Irish as uaine. In Middle Irish and Old Irish, glas was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of grey (i.e. the glas of a sword, the glas of stone, etc). In Modern Irish, gorm is the word for "blue"—the first part (gor(m)) pronounced as in the Welsh gwyr(dd).

In Kurdish the word "şîn" (pronounced sheen), meaning "blue", is used for green things in nature like leaves, grass, and eyes. However, there is another word, "kesk", which is used for other green things, for instance in the Kurdish flag.

The Kazakh language, like many Turkic languages, makes the same distinction, with kök as the word for the color of the sky, the sea, and green plants, but jasâl as the color for man-made green things.

Pashto uses the same word, "sheen", as in Kurdish to denote blue as well as green. "Shinkay", a word derived from "sheen", means greenery but "sheen asman" means blue sky. When there is ambiguity, it is common to ask (as in Vietnamese), "'sheen' like the sky?" or "'sheen' like plants?"

Zulu uses the word "-luhlaza" (the prefix changes according the the class of the noun) for "blue/green".

Single words for blue/green are also found in Mayan languages; for example in the Yukatek Maya language "blue/green" is "yax".

Tupian languages did not originally differ between the two colors, though they may do now as a result of interference of Spanish (in the case of Guaraní) or Portuguese (in the case of Nheengatu). The Tupi word obý ([oβɨ]) meant both as do the Guarani hovy (ɦɔvɨ).

• Semantic field for the concept of the range of words
• Blue
• Green
• Sea green
• Grue is sometimes used to translate from the above-mentioned languages into English.
• List of colors
• Traditional Colors of Japan
• Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
• Color name

• Green... midori? ao? – Yomiuri Shimbun's "Pera Pera Penguin" column, vol. 32