Research on Colour Words

Berlin and Kay (1969) 'Basic Color Terms, their Universality and Evolution'

There are 11 basic colour terms in English:

red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, grey, black and white.
Languages evolved from having only 2 basic colour terms, and gradually added more over time until they reached a maximum of 11 basic terms.

An edited version of "Some apparent uniformities between languages in colour-naming" by Robin Allott. 1974 summarises Berlin and Kay as follows:

Current doctrine in linguistics and anthropology holds that each language and culture expresses a unique world view by its particular way of slicing up reality into named categories. (See Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
This says that it is difficult to make exact translations between languages because hearers see the world in a way governed by their own language.
Colour vocabulary is a possible example of this.
According to accepted doctrine, basic colour words are not translatable across languages.
Analysing ninety-eight languages Berlin and Kay found that eleven colours words act as focal points of all the basic colour words in all the languages of the world. This set of eleven seems therefore to be a semantic universal. Basic colour words are translatable.
They also found that words for the basic colours arose in different languages in a regular sequence:
• all languages with only two basic colour words have words for black and white;
• languages with exactly three basic colour words have words for black, white and red and so on.

Although this has been modified by later research the basic principle remains. Berlin and Kay interpreted this as a demonstration of language evolution.

They grouped the ninety-eight languages studied into seven stages of an evolutionary sequence running from primitive languages with words only for WHITE and BLACK to more advanced languages with words for the whole range of colours. The classification was as follows: