Turkish color terms: tests of Berlin and Kay’s theory of color universals and linguistic relativity

Abstract

We report a study of Turkish color terms with four main aims: to establish the inventory of BASIC color terms; to compare this inventory with Berlin and Kay's 11 color universals; to see if Turkish is an exception to the theory by having two basic terms for blue; and if it is, to explore whether there are cognitive effects of the two blue terms. Eighty children aged from eight to 14 years and 153 adults performed a color-term list task (write down as many color terms as you can) and a subset of these two samples went on to perform a color-naming task. In the naming task, they were asked to name 65 representative color tiles. Measures of salience and consensus derived from the two tasks converge to suggest that Turkish has 12 basic color terms. The denotations of these terms and the glosses provided by dictionaries and Turkish-speaking consultants are consistent with 11 of the terms being Turkish tokens of Berlin and Kay's 11 universal categories. The twelfth term - lacivert dark blue'- lies between the foci of the universal blue and purple and its range overlaps with the dark-blue term of Russian, sinij. However, in a third phase of the investigation, the majority of informants said that lacivert dark blue' was a kind of mavi blue', thus violating one of Berlin and Kay's criteria (noninclusion) for basicness. Thus we have the unusual, but logically possible, case of a term being used with prevalence, consensus, and specificity, while at the same time being acknowledged as a subset of another term. Whatever the status of the two blue terms, however, we found evidence that the cognitive representation of the blue region of color space may reflect the salience of the two blue terms using color grouping, similarity judgments, and same different tasks