Color terms have a lot of variation from language to language, and even though we call all see the rainbow, it doesn't mean all the people have specific names for all the colors of rainbow. Ainu is one of those languages; traditionally, Ainu had only four colors: retar 'to be white', kunne 'to be black; to be dark', hure 'to be red; to be orange; to be purple', and siwnin 'to be green; to be blue; to be yellow' (that might be quite new word and might be a loan from Russian синий (sinij), but this needs further research). According to Tamura (2000: 264) the typical color the word hure 'to be red' represents is blood and siwnin 'to be blue; to be green; to be yellow' is grass in southern Hokkaido, in which Saru variety also belongs to (in northern Hokkaido the typical color is that of water. Also, in the eastern Hokkaido varieties siwnin is used rather in the form siynin. This doesn't concern us, because were are studying here the Saru variety that is a southern variety).
Tamura (2000: 264) also lists the following color terms that are used often in everyday interactions: ekurok 'pitch black', nikap iro 'orange' (Lit. 'the color of tree bark'), humun iro 'green' (Lit. fresh grass color), konkane iro 'golden', and sirokane iro 'silver'. The words ending with iro 'color' are nouns, so if you want to use them to describe the color of something, you need to attach the copula ne 'to be' after them, or maybe a verb like us 'something is attached to something' could work, too. The words konkane 'gold' and sirokane 'silver' are often use as-is to make noun compounds: konkane pisakku 'a gold(en) laddle' and sirokanipe 'silver drops' (the form sirokani is used in Horobetsu variety and some other varieties; sirokane in Saru variety and some other varieties). Pink and grey can be formed by adding ru- 'slightly' in front of hure and retar/kunne, so ruhure 'pink' and ruretar '(pale) grey' and rukunne '(dark) grey'.
It might be that the concept of color hasn't been that important for Ainu and the word for 'color' itself used today is a loan from Japanese: (N-AFF) iro; iro; iroho (notice that the word has affiliative forms, so color is consider an inalienable property). Then there is the word tom (VI) 'to shine; to sparkle; to glitter; to glow'. Since it is an intransitive verb, it can be converted into a noun with the meaning 'shine; glitter; glow', and more broadly 'hue; tint; shade of color'.
Of course, with the society changing and new ways of looking at things entering the Ainu culture, also the need to express the colors more precisely has arisen (mainly based on Japanese way to categorize colors that has in turn been strongly influence by the European sense of color). So, how do you distinguish green and yellow and blue (siwnin) or red and orange and purple (hure)? Well, there are some locally used words that can divide the colors in more refined categories. In Obihiro region, the word for 'yellow' is sikerpepeus (Lit. (the color of) the liquid of the berries of Amur cork tree attached). This has been adopted by some Saru speakers in the contemporary vocabulary they use. Another word that is sometimes used for 'green' in the Saru region is hukinatomne (Lit. to be of the hue/glow of fresh leaves). Other words for green, or especially grass green, are humun iro '(the color) green; (fresh) grass green' and kinapetomne 'to be green; to be grass green.' If the person uses the words sikerpepeus 'to be yellow' and hukinatomne 'to be green' (or the other words to specify green), they probably use the word siwnin to refer to blue only and maybe nisiro for 'to be light blue; to be sky blue'. There is also a word for brown kenepetomne 'to be brown' (Lit. to be of the hue/glow of the liquid of an alder tree), but to my understanding this is not well entrenched.
Tamura (2000: 265) also notices that there are of course means to express more precisely the exact color of something and lists the following very specific color terms as examples: ooho pet iro 'the color of a deep river', yukermu kurka neno an iro 'the color that is like the back of a (certain type of) mouse', tumu kurot siwnin 'to be shadow green' (Lit. lingering inside the shadows green), and ponno ruhure retar 'to be a bit pinkish white'.
That was a long explanation about the colors in Ainu. Finally, here's a list of the most commonly used terms discussed above.
retar (VI STAT) — to be white
ruretar (VI STAT) — to be light grey
kunne (VI STAT) — to be black
rukunne (VI STAT) — to be dark grey
ekurok (VI STAT) — to be pitch black
hure (VI STAT) — to be red; to be orange; to be purple
ruhure (VI STAT) — to be pink
nikap iro ne/nikap iro us (VI STAT) — to be orange
siwnin (VI STAT) — to be blue; to be green; to be yellow
nisiro ne/nisiro us (VI STAT) — to be light blue; to be sky blue
sikerpepeus (VI STAT) — to be yellow
humun iro ne/humun iro us (VI STAT) — to be green; to be (fresh) grass green
hukinatomne (VI STAT) — to be green
kinapetomne (VI STAT) — to be green; to be grass green
konkane iro ne/konkane iro us (VI STAT) — to be golden
sirokane iro ne/sirokane iro us (VI STAT) — to be silver; to be silvery
kenepetomne (VI STAT) — to be brown
In addition to the "traditional" words of Ainu and each of its varieties, there are newly coined words made quite recently. If you make a quick web search about color terms in Ainu, you get some interesting results. For example, Ainu phrasebook in Wikitravel gives you a list of color terms and if you look at it carefully, you can see that it differs quite a lot from the ones given above. (As of 22/7/2025) grey is translated to katuwa; blue to asanki; orange to huretom siwnin; purple to asanki kohure; and brown to toyero. It might be that someone, who is speaking a different dialect than what I know, is using these terms, but I've never seen these in any other place than on that page. Some of these can also be found in Wikivoyage Ainu phrasebook. Seems to me the person who has added them to the phrasebook, has created these words themselves, except the word asanki that can be found in Ota Mitsuru's Japanese-Ainu dictionary draft as a borrowing from Japanese and in the form asanki-iro 'pale blue-green color,' classified as a noun and neologism.
Let's look at these words. Katuwa is a name of plant, that is definitely not grey (see my speculation how this word ended up being 'grey' in the paragraph below). As mentioned, Asanki comes probably from Japanese asagi (あさぎ/浅葱) 'pale blue-green' (something like this ❤︎ or this ❤︎), which is not your typical blue (I think something like this ❤︎ when I think of the color blue). huretom siwnin for orange uses the words introduced at the beginning of this page: hure 'to be red; to be orange; to be purple' tom 'shine; glitter; glow' siwnin 'to be blue; to be green; to be yellow'. asanki kohure for purple consists of the asanki 'pale blue-green' borrowed from Japanese, then a component of which use I don't quite understand in this context (ko-), and finally hure 'to be red; to be orange; to be purple'. toyero for brown comes probably from toy 'dirt' and ero < iro 'color'. Again, I don't know what the person, who coined these words has been thinking or if this is about the difference in dialects, but they probably though that the Japanese word for color should be borrowed to Ainu in the form of ero rather than iro, because the Japanese word for 'tuber; potato' imo, has been borrowed to Ainu as emo 'potato' (some varieties use imo, though). It looks to me that asanki and toyero and maybe katuwa, too, are nouns, not verbs, so you can't use them as they are to modify a noun or as a predicate but have to attach copula ne 'to be (like)'or us 'to be attached' after them.
Now, I understand that people want to spread knowledge about Ainu online but presenting neologisms like this as the common words in a place like Wikitravel phrasebook is probably not very helpful nor useful for other learners. There should be at least a mention that these are not commonly used words and a mention if they have been coined recently. Also, if you spread some information, you should be sure that it's correct. So, let's look at the mystery katuwa more carefully. If you make a search on the web for "ainu color terms katuwa", some private person's blog along the Wikitravel/Wikivoyage phrase books appear. The color terms have been added to the phrase books earlier than the blog post has been posted, so the blogger has probably just copied whatever they found in the phrase book. So, where did that someone who put it in the phrase book got this word? Why katuwa that is just a random green plant with red flowers should mark grey? Well, there is another search result; John Batchelor's Ainu-Japanese-English dictionary. If you search for katuwa in the dictionary, you will find
"Katuwa, カツワェ, ヒナノウスツボ. n. Scrophularia alata, A. Gray."
Now you can probably realize why someone made this mistake: They thought that part of the scientific name of the plant was actually the meaning of the word. So, be extremely careful and critical when reading anything about Ainu on the web (including my page, of course). People who seem to have no idea what they are doing are sharing their "information" out there (I hope to have at least some idea what I'm doing, though). Also, if some who has extra time on their hands reads this, could you please update the phrase books with, for example, the "traditional" color names I've listed above and write a disclaimer that color words in Ainu are not standardized and different varieties might use different words. Thank you!
On the other hand, when you look at the Japanese version of the same Ainu phrasebook in Wikitravel, different color terms are used (If you don't know Japanese and want to see on the linked page what I'm talking about, you can press Ctrl+F or command+F and type in for example 'iro' to find the section I'm talking about here). That page actually first introduces the "traditional"/long-existing color terms (from iro 'color' to peker 'to be clear; to be bright') and then mentions that the words below are newly coined words (starting from the second mention of hure 'to be red' down to rayocine 'to be rainbow-colored'). The Japanese version of Ainu phrasebook has many neologisms, too. For example pewrekinapeus for 'to be purple' (pewre 'to be young', kina 'grass', pe 'liquid; sap', us 'to be attached') and rayocine (rayoci 'rainbow'; ne 'to be (like)') for 'to be rainbow-colored'. Many other neologisms used on that site come from a specific attempt to make distinct color terms for teaching purposes. So, there are other attempts to express the Japanese or English scale of colors in Ainu, too, and these are introduced in detail below.
The people adopting te ataarangi teaching method for Ainu coined some new terms for colors when they first started to learn the method about 10 years ago. They used Saru variety as the base of their teaching. The group that was learning te ataarangi method did not have time to thoroughly research on the existing color terms at the time they needed to use them in actual lessons, so they made up some words and just continued using without giving it too much thought. Now te ataarangi practitioners have, however, adopted the "traditional" color terms listed in the list above, but let's leave these neology suggestions here for interest.
In te ataarangi method, colorful Cuisenaire rods are used as props in teaching and to be able to talk about the individual rods, you need to be able to make difference between the colors of the rods. Black and white are easy and hure is used for red only, siwnin for blue only. In addition, for example, homane 'to be orange' (Lit. to be (like) salmon roe), surkune 'to be purple; to be violet' (Lit. to be (like) aconite/wolfsbane), and makayone 'to be light green' (Lit. to be (like) sprout of Japanese butterbur) have been coined. In addition, the word toyne (Lit. to be(come) (like) dirt) has been assigned the meaning of 'to be brown'. Toyne can be found in some old documentation in the meaning of 'to be terrible' and 'to look bad' (can be also found used in the context of the color of face of a sick person and translated into Japanese as massao/真っ青 'to be pale'), so the adding the meaning of brown is a semantic extension to the existing word. (You can read more about these in a paper a wrote some years ago: "Language revitalization through lexical modernization and neologism-coining : The current state and future tasks of modernizing Ainu lexicon". The color terms are discussed on pages 138–139.)
The newly coined and/or adopted words toyne 'to be brown', homane 'to be orange', surkune 'to be violet', and makayone 'to be light green' are bit problematic from the point of view of Ainu word formation and meaning. As we can see from the other color terms above, Ainu as the first language speakers tended rather to form the color terms with description of the color (eg. deep river) and then adding the word iro 'color' and followed optionally us 'to be attached' or ne 'to be (like); to become (like)'. Another option is to modify the phrase tomne 'to be of the hue/glow of ...' with the description of the color. It might also be OK to use just the verb us 'to be attached' after the color description (as in sikerpepeus 'to be yellow').
Now, there are indeed several intransitive nouns that originate in 'noun + ne' combo. One of them is even a color term: kunne 'to be black; to be dark' comes probably from kur 'shadow' and ne 'to be (like)'. Other examples from our big list of descriptive/static intransitive verbs are tontone 'to be bald' from tonto 'leather; tanned hide' and ne 'to be (like)', tanne 'to be long' maybe from root word tam 'long sword; saber' or tar 'rope' and ne 'to be (like)', and takne 'to be short' probably from tak 'lump; clump; bundle' and ne 'to be (like)'.
So, then, what is wrong with the newly coined homane 'to be orange', surkune 'to be violet,' makayone 'to be light green', and the new use of toyne 'to be brown' (also the rayocine 'to be rainbow-colored' in Wikitravel phrase book)?
Well, first, as said before, the color terms usually use other means of word formation than just attaching ne 'to be (like)' after nouns. While I'm not opposed to neologisms in anyway (on the contrary, I think they are fun and useful!), coining neologisms in a case of lesser used minority languages is always something you should do really carefully. There are always people who oppose creation of new vocabulary to their beloved language. However, while languages do have group ownership, they are not anyone's personal property, and the speakers have a right to use it as they like and create the new words they want. Anyway, it's always best to try to avoid unnecessary conflicts, and usually it's easier to convince the conservatives not to complain about the newly coined words—and maybe even accept them—if their formation follows the traditional way of thinking as closely as possible. So, this is about authenticity and credibility of the new words in the eyes of the (potential) speakers of the language.
The second reason is related to semantics (meaning) and the word-formation methods of Ainu. If you consider carefully the meaning of the existing intransitive verbs with noun+ne pattern, you will notice that they describe a state. For example, let's look at the four descriptive verbs I talked already about above:
Kunne (originally in the meaning of 'to be(come) dark'—also 'night'—and then meaning is extended to 'to be(come) black') means that the state of surroundings becomes/has become like a shadow, that is, dark.
Tontone 'to be(come) bald' means that the state of appearance (or maybe even the feel when touched?) of something has become like tanned leather, there are no hair anywhere.
Tanne 'to be long' and takne 'to be short' describe the state of objects' appearance (and maybe even the feel when you touch them with your hands?): it is/has become like a saber or rope (that is, long) or like a clump (that is, short).
There are plenty of other similar examples, too. However, none of these types of descriptive verbs describe color. So, if you say homane, it more likely means the state of the appearance (or feel) of something has become like salmon roe; maybe a bit slimy and slippery or maybe it refers to the size and shape of the individual eggs. Surkune is a bit trickier than that. Surku refers indeed to the aconite plant. The plant is poisonous, so surku also has another general meaning: 'poison' (surkukarus 'poisonous mushroom' etc.). The word surkune, makes you immediately think of 'poison' instead the color of the flowers of the plant. So, maybe it would be better to stick to the traditional color term formation methods with this one, and make it rather surkuiro(ne/us) or surkutomne or even change surku to some other flower that doesn't have that strong association with poison but has violet/purple flowers, such as ento (a type of galingale) or kosa (a type of arrowroot). The word toy means 'dirt' or 'soil' but it has another meaning: it is a prefix that intensifies the meaning of the word it is attached to and also add often gives the word negative nuance. This is probably the meaning that is used in the original meaning of the word toyne 'to be horrible; to look bad'. So, if you are terribly busy, you can be toyyaymonniska and if you are exhausted, you are toysinki. In addition, there are already words for orange and brown in Ainu (I don't know how frequently they have been used, but they do appear in dictionary, though), so is there really a need for these two new words?
Anyway, Ainu is being revitalized at the moment, and this is a part of the language that is expected to change and evolve a lot during the revitalization and reclamation process. So, only the future shows what happens to these neologisms: will they become a part of the stable Ainu vocabulary, and if they do, with which meanings, or will they be forgotten and re(re)placed the existing words or will something completely different happen with color terms.
Created on 2023/2/17
Latest update on 2025/7/22: Split from lesson 11: color terms including the explanation about neologisms; added explanation about the Wikitravel/Wikivoyage color terms