ABSTRACT
There are common physiological bases for color vision (Bond, 1986), so there is no difference between cultures in the actual perception of colors. That said, early studies on color codability demonstrated that people in different societies did not have the same array of colors to partition the color spectrum (Whorf, 1964). Berlin and Kay (1969) argued that if the mechanism underlying color perception is universal, there should be agreement on colors among those who speak different languages from different cultural environments in spite of variations in color vocabulary. They studied some 20 languages and discovered meaningful regularities in the use of basic color terms which are names of color categories consisting of only one morpheme. They also noted an evolutionary progression in color terms in the sense that culturally simpler societies tended to have fewer basic color terms than culturally complex societies, for example large-scale, industrial countries. MacLaury’s (1991) work also demonstrated the effect of cultural factors on color coding. A comprehensive study of color naming was presented by Russell, Deregowski, and Kinnear (1997). Davies and Corbett (1997) studied speakers of English, Russian, and Setswana languages and found that they differed in the number of basic color terms and in how the bluegreen region is categorized. This suggests that although the strict meanings of basic colors may be similar across cultures, there is still the potential for considerable variability, and it is a good practice to use colors carefully.
