Brent Berlin and Paul Kay
An anthropologist and a linguist showed in 1969 that the world's color words follow a hidden order.
- Book
- Basic Color Terms, 1969
- Data
- 20 languages tested, 78 more from sources
- Follow-up
- World Color Survey, 110 languages
Brent Berlin (born 1936), an anthropologist who studied how the Maya of Chiapas name plants and animals, and Paul Kay (born 1934), then an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and later a linguist there, published Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution in 1969. Their question: do languages carve up color arbitrarily, as many scholars then believed, or is there a pattern?
They asked speakers of 20 languages to name colors and point them out on a grid of Munsell color chips, and added published descriptions of 78 more languages. Two findings stood out. People agreed strikingly on the best example of each color word, even where the edges of their words differed. And languages seemed to gain basic color terms in a fixed order, from dark and light, to red, to green and yellow, to blue, to brown, then the rest.
That was a blow to strong linguistic relativity, and it revived an older idea: Lazarus Geiger, reading Homer and other ancient texts in the 1860s, had proposed that blue words come last. Kay and colleagues later ran the World Color Survey of 110 unwritten languages, which kept the broad trends and softened the strict sequence.
Critics such as the linguist John Lucy argued that the method pushed English-style categories onto other languages, where 'color' words can also mean shine, freshness or texture. Kay himself later concluded, with Terry Regier, that 'Whorf was half right': universal tendencies shape color naming, and language still nudges perception. The 11 basic colors in this app are their English list.
Swatches
- Black · stage I
- White · stage I
- Red · stage II
- Green · stage III–IV
- Yellow · stage III–IV
- Blue · stage V
- Brown · stage VI
- Purple · stage VII
- Pink · stage VII
- Orange · stage VII
- Grey · stage VII
Colors
Sources
- Berlin, B. & Kay, P. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press.
- Lucy, J. A. (1997). The linguistics of 'color'. In C. L. Hardin & L. Maffi (eds.), Color Categories in Thought and Language. Cambridge University Press.
- Regier, T. & Kay, P. (2009). Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(10): 439–446.
- Kay, P., Berlin, B., Maffi, L., Merrifield, W. R. & Cook, R. (2009). The World Color Survey. CSLI Publications.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.