Colour and language
Basic colour terms: Berlin and Kay
A 1969 study argued that languages add colour words in a set order, from black and white to red and onwards. It is still debated.
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Languages differ in how many colour words they have. Some manage with two or three basic ones, English has eleven, Russian twelve. In 1969 the American scholars Brent Berlin and Paul Kay argued that these words are not carved up at random. Languages seem to add them in a broadly fixed order. The idea has been revised many times and remains influential and contested.
What a basic term is
A basic colour term is a single everyday word that all speakers know and use for anything of that colour. Red is basic in English. Scarlet is not, because it is a kind of red. Blonde is not, because it applies only to hair and wood. Salmon is not, because it is the name of a thing. By these tests English has eleven: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. A language with fewer basic terms can still describe any colour by comparison, as English does with words like turquoise.
The proposed order
Berlin and Kay compared colour words from 98 languages, twenty of them with speakers in person. They proposed stages. A language with two terms splits colours into dark and cool against light and warm. A third term is always red. Next come green and yellow in either order, then blue, then brown, then purple, pink, orange and grey. The best example of each term, the reddest red, fell in much the same place across languages. They took this to mean that colour naming rests on shared human vision and is not purely a matter of convention.
Criticism and revision
The first study was criticised for relying on bilingual speakers living in California and on written sources. A much larger project, the World Color Survey, later collected data in the field from 110 unwritten languages. It supported a general tendency while showing many exceptions, and the tidy stages were loosened. Critics also argue that the method assumes colour is a separate topic in every language, when in many it is bound up with texture, shine, ripeness or wetness. Most researchers now accept both real shared tendencies and real variation shaped by culture.
Colours on this page
Also part of it, and being written: Brown.
Sources and further reading
- Basic Color Terms on Wikipedia
- Regier, Kay and Khetarpal, Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space, PNAS (2007)
- Loreto and others, On the origin of the hierarchy of color names, PNAS (2012)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Color
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.