The World Color Survey (WCS) was begun in the late seventies to test and refine the hypotheses proposed by Berlin and Kay (1969) that (1) there are universal constraints on the patterns of color naming across languages and (2) there are universal constraints on the temporal development of systems of basic color terms. The WCS has collected data in 110 non-literate language communities from (usually) twenty-five speakers per community, insofar as possible monolingual. Partial analysis of the resulting data show that (a) the main lines of the broad hypotheses given as (1) and (2) above are confirmed, (b) the specifics of the evolutionary sequence proposed in 1969 must be loosened in the light of more recent data, (c) the resulting picture accords in some detail with known or proposed properties of the visual system, confirming the further hypothesis that universals in the semantics of color naming are driven by universals in the visual processing of color (probably shared with non-speaking species such as the great apes and old world monkeys).

References

• Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: U. of Cal. Press.