Introduction

Color nomenclature has been an ongoing research problem in anthropology for over a century, ever since ethnographers discovered that “quaint and exotic peoples” have equally intriguing ways of naming the colors of their world. It was puzzling to find that so “natural” and neutral a stimulus as the color spectrum could be divided up – that is, named – in hundreds of different ways. This variety of color vocabulary was taken as the best argument for linguistic relativism; indeed, it was the only real empirical evidence that seemed to indicate that there is nothing inherent in either human perceptual faculties or the physical world that would compel a language to name some domain in any particular fashion.

In 1969, however, Berlin and Kay and others demonstrated cross-culturally that there are some severe constraints on how color nomenclature systems operate and how they develop. In short, if certain unanalyzable, monolexemic, and psychologically salient color terms are taken to be “basic,” there is a universal ordering to the color spectrum and limitations on the way colors can be labeled. These eleven “basic” color categories – WHITE and BLACK; RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, BROWN; and PURPLE, PINK, ORANGE, and GREY – are thought to be universal across cultures, and as languages/cultures evolve and develop new terms for colors, they will do so approximately in this order.