Resolving the question of color naming universals

Abstract

The existence of cross-linguistic universals in color naming is currently contested. Early empirical studies, based principally on languages of industrialized societies, suggested that all languages may draw on a universally shared repertoire of color categories. Recent work, in contrast, based on languages from nonindustrialized societies, has suggested that color categories may not be universal. No comprehensive objective tests have yet been conducted to resolve this issue. We conduct such tests on color naming data from languages of both industrialized and nonindustrialized societies and show that strong universal tendencies in color naming exist across both sorts of language.

Fig. 1.

Color array from the WCS. For the Munsell notations of the colors in this stimulus array see ref. .

Fig. 2.

Creating a randomized data set.

Fig. 3.

Monte Carlo tests. (a) Clustering within the WCS. The distribution of dispersion values shown in gray was obtained from 1,000 randomized data sets. The arrow indicates the dispersion value obtained from the WCS data. (b) Comparing the WCS with BK. The distribution of separation values shown in gray was obtained from 1,000 randomized data sets. The arrow indicates the separation value obtained by comparing the WCS data with BK data (1).

Fig. 4.

Distribution of color terms from nonindustrialized languages. (a) The floor plane corresponds to the chromatic (non-neutral) portion of the color stimulus array. The height of the surface at each point in the plane denotes the number of speaker centroids in the WCS data set that fall at that position in color space. (b) The distribution of a is viewed from above by a contour plot. The outermost contour represents a height of 100 centroids, and each subsequent contour represents an increment in height of 100 centroids. English color terms fall near the peaks of the WCS distribution.