Linguistic Relativity and Colour Terminology

Abstract

In the recent anthropological-linguistic literature attention has been given to the study of basic colour terminology across languages and cultures in an effort to learn if different cultures see the world in different ways, and if language contributes to the way in which we see the world. One of the most influential of these studies (Berlin and Kay, 1969) suggests that there is a hierarchy of basic colour terminologies across cultures, that, for example, if a culture has two basic colour terms, they will be the terms for black and white, if three, black, white, and red, and so on up to eleven such terms. Furthermore, they suggest that there is a correlation between the number of basic colour terms in a particular language, which is a cultural product, and the level of technological achievement in that culture. Thus Walbiri, an aboriginal Australian language has just two, while English has all eleven. We find the following facts, however, which contradict their analysis of the colour terminology situation in languages around the world: (1) The linguistic criteria by which colour term studies define what is and what is not a basic colour term are ad hoc and ethnocentric. That is, the criteria cannot serve to define semantic domains other than colour, and, furthermore, the criteria seem chosen specifically to characterize the English terms. (2) When we remove these criteria and consider directly the way in which different languages characterize the colour spectrum, we find an overwhelming uniformity. (3) When we look at the history of the basic colour terms in English, we find that for the most part they were available to earlier stages of the language when the culture could hardly have been described as technologically advanced.