World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity

Abstract

We analyzed the color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS) (www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/), a large color-naming database obtained from informants of mostly unwritten languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures that have had limited contact with modern, industrialized society. The color naming idiolects of 2,367 WCS informants fall into three to six "motifs," where each motif is a different color-naming system based on a subset of a universal glossary of 11 color terms. These motifs are universal in that they occur worldwide, with some individual variation, in completely unrelated languages. Strikingly, these few motifs are distributed across the WCS informants in such a way that multiple motifs occur in most languages. Thus, the culture a speaker comes from does not completely determine how he or she will use color terms. An analysis of the modern patterns of motif usage in the WCS languages, based on the assumption that they reflect historical patterns of color term evolution, suggests that color lexicons have changed over time in a complex but orderly way. The worldwide distribution of the motifs and the cooccurrence of multiple motifs within languages suggest that universal processes control the naming of colors.

Fig. 1.

Glossary and motifs in the WCS. (A) The WCS color chart, arranged according to Munsell hue (horizontal) and value (vertical), with 10 neutral samples (leftmost column). (B) Concordance maps of the 11 color terms, in false color, with the color terms used in this paper. (C) Concordance maps of the color-naming systems (motifs). Columns indicate solutions for K clusters (K = 1 is the whole dataset). Titles are motif names. Roman numerals indicate corresponding stages from Berlin and Kay (parentheses) or Kay and Maffi (brackets). At K = 4 (concordance maps enlarged for clarity), 614 informants used the Green/Blue motif, 1,063 used the Grue motif, 313 used the Gray motif, and 377 informants used the Dark motif.

Fig. 2.

Within-language diversity in color naming. (A) Diversity in 110 WCS languages. Each pie chart represents one WCS language (numbers at the top). The wedges within pie charts are the proportion of informants assigned to each motif at K = 4 (color codes on the top correspond to the enlarged clusters in Fig. 1C). Excluded informants named fewer than 320 of the 330 color samples. (B) Examples of WCS data from four languages; language numbers from A. The top two rows are the two K = 6 branches of the GBP (Green|Blue|Purple) motif; the second two rows are the two K = 5 branches of the Grue motif, both of which are united as single motifs at K = 4. False colors indicate glossed color terms (Fig. 1B). Notice the similarity among speakers from different continents (rows) and the diversity among speakers of each language (columns).

Fig. 3.

Languages with multiple motifs. (A) Histogram of the number of languages with one to four motifs at K = 4. Full dataset (black bars indicate K-means; gray bars, spectral clustering). White bars indicate aggressively culled data (hierarchical clustering). (B) Full dataset of languages (spheres) in tetrahedral coordinates based on the prevalence of the motifs within languages obtained by K-means analysis. False colors indicate the most frequent motif: Dark (black), Gray (yellow), Grue (cyan), and GBP (blue). Full dataset (C) and culled dataset (D) projected onto the Dark–Grue–GBP facet, with contour plots of language density based on a Gaussian sampling kernel (σ = 0.01). Languages on the rising facets of the tetrahedron project to the edges of the triangles in C and D.