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You are here: Home / Trend / Color / The Surprising Pattern Behind Naming Colors Around the World

The Surprising Pattern Behind Naming Colors Around the World

May 24, 2017 By Steve Borsch -

Understanding how cultures around the world label colors — and in what order they do so — might seem like a daunting undertaking, but surprisingly it’s not.  Vox video producer Christophe Haubursin and his colleague, graphic designer Amanda Northrop, reveal interesting commonalities among cultures in their recently published video below.

They begin with a groundbreaking study published in the 1960s:

In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: that every culture in history, when they developed their languages, invented words for colors in the exact same order. They claimed to know this based off of a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red , and so on. The theory was revolutionary — and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge.

Filed Under: Color  

Comments

  1. TERRI says

    May 30, 2017 at 3:29 pm

    Really great video. Thanks for sharing!

  2. Steve Borsch says

    May 30, 2017 at 3:39 pm

    Thanks Terri. Always amazing to me that there is so much history, and context, surrounding color and that we continually come across fun stuff like this one.

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