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Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology pp 77–80Cite as

Berlin and Kay Theory

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Definition

The Berlin-Kay theory of basic color terms maintains that the world’s languages share all or part of a common stock of color concepts and that terms for these concepts evolve in a constrained order.

Basic Color Terms

In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay advanced a theory of cross-cultural color concepts centered on the notion of a basic color term [1]. A basic color term (BCT) is a color word that is applicable to a wide class of objects (unlike blonde), is monolexemic (unlike light blue), and is reliably used by most native speakers (unlike chartreuse). The languages of modern industrial societies have thousands of color words, but only a very slender stock of basic color terms. English has 11: red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, gray, orange, brown, pink, and purple. Slavic languages have 12, with separate basic terms for light blue and dark blue.

In unwritten and tribal languages the number of BCTs can be substantially smaller, perhaps as few as two or three, with...

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References

  1. Berlin, B., Kay, P.: Basic Color Terms. University of California Press, Berkeley (1969)

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  2. Casson, R.W.: Color shift: evolution of English color terms from brightness to hue. In: Hardin, C.L., Maffi, L. (eds.) Color Categories in Thought and Language, pp. 224–239. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1997)

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  3. Kay, P., Berlin, B., Maffi, L., Merrifield, W.R., Cook, R.: The World Color Survey. CSLI Publications, Stanford (2009)

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  4. MacLaury, R.: Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages. University of Texas Press, Austin (1997)

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  8. Kay, P., Regier, T.: Resolving the question of color naming universals. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 100(15), 9085–9089 (2003)

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  10. Yendrikhovskij, S.N.: A computational model of color categorization. Color Res. Appl. 26, 235–238 (2001)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University, 541 Hall of Languages, Syracuse, NY, 13244, USA

    C. L. Hardin

Authors
  1. C. L. Hardin
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Correspondence to C. L. Hardin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Modern, Optical Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Ming Ronnier Luo

  2. School of Design, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Ming Ronnier Luo

  3. Graduate Institute of Colour and Illumination, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Ming Ronnier Luo

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Hardin, C.L. (2016). Berlin and Kay Theory. In: Luo, M.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8071-7_62

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