Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution

By Paul Kay. 1973

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology, Linguistics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

In Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

Describing Textures in the Wild (2013, background): “g point is the list of 98 words identiﬁed by Bhusan, Rao and Lohse [5]. Their seminal work aimed to achieve for texture recognition the same that color words have achieved for describing color spaces [4]. However, their work mainly focuses on the cognitive aspects of texture perception, including pe”
A UNIFIED MODEL (2007, background): “Similarly, if the source language has a two-color system (Berlin & Kay, 1969), as in Dani, acquisition of an eight-color system, as in Hungarian, will be difficult.”
WEIRD languages have misled us, too (2010, background): “…do speakers of most of the thousands of other languages of the world (Kay&Maffi2008), and the pinnacle of color categorization (in terms of how many divisions of the color space a language makes) has been taken to be 11 – exactly the number that English has (Berlin & Kay 1969; Kay & Maffi 2008).”
With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time (2006, background): “Color terms, once the “parade example” of cultural variability (if blue and green are not universals, what are?) have in the last 30 years come to be seen instead as providing strong evidence of the constraints posed by human perception and cognitive processing on linguistic and cultural categorizat”
An online color naming experiment in Russian using Munsell color samples (2018, background): “The Russian BCT for “brown” is koričnevyj.(5) It has a high ranking although lower than that of primary BCTs.”
Building Machine Translation Systems for the Next Thousand Languages (2022, result): “This observation is consistent with cross-lingual hierarchy of color terms described in Berlin & Kay (1969); Saunders & Brakel (2002), which find that terms for color generally arise in specific orders across the world’s cultures, with words for “red” occurring in stage II of color development,…”
Adaptive Color Attributes for Real-Time Visual Tracking (2014, background): “In a linguistic study performed by Berlin and Kay [3], it was concluded that the English language contains eleven basic color terms: black, blue, brown, grey, green, orange, pink, purple, red, white and yellow.”
The Brain's concepts: the role of the Sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge (2005, unknown): “This view was challenged by the research by Berlin, Rosch, and their co-workers in the 1970s (Berlin, Breedlove, & Raven, 1974; Berlin & Kay, 1969; Rosch, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1994; Rosch & Lloyd, 1978; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976).”
Culture and Cognition (2019, unknown): “The color lexicon varies tremendously across languages (Berlin & Kay, 1969).”
Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories (1975, background): “While the domain for which such a claim has been demonstrated most unequivocally is that of color (Berlin & Kay, 1969; Heider, 1971, 1972; Mervis, Catlin, & Rosch, 1975; Rosch, 1974, in press-c, in pressd ), there is also considerable evidence that natural superordinate semantic categories have a…”
Singing the Russian Blues: An Argument for Culturally Basic Color Terms (2005, methodology): “The Russian language is known to have two contenders for the English-language blue, one of eleven basic color terms (BCTs) according to the theory of Berlin and Kay (1969) and its more recent modifications (Kay & McDaniel, 1978; Kay et al., 1991; Kay & Maffi, 2000).”
Colour appeal in website design within and across cultures: A multi-method evaluation (2010, background): “With respect to trust, researchers have endeavored to uncover the complexities of trust in online environments (Berlin and Kay, 1969; Chattopadhyay et al., 1999; Cyr, 2008; Del Galdo and Neilson, 1996; Holland and Baker, 2001; Loftus and Mackworth, 1978; Nunnally, 1978, Venkatesh et al., 2003).1…”
CULTURE AND NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR (2006, unknown): “But there have also been challenges to it, especially with regard to the influence of language lexicons and semantics (Au, 1983; Berlin & Kay, 1969; Rosch & Lloyd, 1978).”