Just how many colors are there?

From Abidji to English to Zapoteco, the perception and naming of color is remarkably consistent in the world's languages. Across cultures, people tend to classify hundreds of different chromatic colors into eight distinct categories: red, green, yellow or orange, blue, purple, brown, pink, and grue (green or blue), note researchers from Ohio State University, Columbus.

Some languages classify colors into fewer categories, but even these are composites of those eight listed above, explains Delwin Lindsey, associate professor of psychology. "Though culture can influence how people name colors, inside our brains, we're pretty much seeing the world in the same way. It doesn't matter if you're a native of the Ivory Coast who speaks Abidji or a Mexican who speaks Zapoteco."

Lindsey and Angela Brown, associate professor of optometry, used data from the World Color Survey, a collection of color names supplied by 2,616 people of 110 mostly unwritten languages. The survey's 320 different colors are organized into eight rows of 40 color chips per row. (Black, white, and grays are each in their own category.) The researchers used the survey because it includes many people from preindustrial societies whose color names are thought to be relatively uncontaminated by contact with highly industrialized cultures whose color names closely resemble those found in English.

Lindsey and Brown devised a statistical method that let them determine the optimum number of color categories based on the color terms uncovered in the study. "My own intuition was that, if we looked across the world at different languages, people would obviously use different names, but roughly, we'd find maybe 11 names used to partition color space.

"That's not at all the case, however. By looking at more traditional cultures, we found that many have fewer color names, yet these names correspond to colors that English-speaking cultures also discriminate linguistically."

The researchers found a major distinction between warm and cool categories for many of those cultures that have just two or three common colors. That distinction tends to coincide with English colors that are thought to be warm (yellows, reds, and oranges) and cool (greens and blues). "While there is some diversity in the location of the color boundaries, there is an absolutely rock solid boundary across all the cultures, which English speakers would call warm and cool," Lindsey states.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning