The concept of linguistic relativity concerns the relationship between language and thought, specifically whether language influences thought, and, if so, how. This question has led to research in multiple disciplines—including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy. Among the most debated theories in this area of work is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This theory states that the language a person speaks will affect the way that this person thinks.Cibelli, Emily; Xu, Yang; Austerweil, Joseph L; Griffiths, Thomas L; Regier, Terry (July 19, 2016). "The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference: Evidence from the Domain of Color". PLoS One. 11 (7). . The theory varies between two main proposals: that language structure determines how individuals perceive the world and that language structure influences the world view of speakers of a given language but does not determine it.
There are two formal sides to the color debate, the universalist and the relativist. The universalist side claims that the biology of all human beings is all the same, so the development of color terminology has absolute universal constraints. The relativist side asserts that the variability of color terms cross-linguistically points to more culture-specific phenomena. Because color exhibits both biological and linguistic aspects, it has become a focus of the study of the relationship between language and thought.Seidner, Stanley S. (1982). Ethnicity, Language, and Power from a Psycholinguistic Perspective. Bruxelles: Centre de recherche sur le pluralinguisme Press In a 2006 review of the debate Paul Kay and Terry Regier concluded that "There are universal constraints on color naming, but at the same time, differences in color naming across languages cause differences in color cognition and/or perception."Kay, P., & Regier, T. (2006). Language, thought and color: recent developments. Trends in cognitive sciences, 10(2), 51-54.
The color debate was made popular in large part due to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study and their subsequent publishing of Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.Berlin, Brent & Kay, Paul (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Although much on color terminology has been done since Berlin and Kay's study, other research predates it, including the mid-nineteenth century work of William Ewart Gladstone and Lazarus Geiger, which also predates the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, as well as the work of Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown in 1950s and 1960s.
Universalist view Berlin and Kay The universalist theory that color cognition is an innate, physiological process rather than a cultural one was introduced in 1969 by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in their book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Their study was intended to challenge the formerly prevailing theory of linguistic relativity set forth by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Berlin and Kay found universal restrictions on the number of basic color terms (BCTs) that a language can have, and on the ways the language can use these terms. The study included data collected from speakers of twenty different languages from a range of language families. Berlin and Kay identified eleven possible basic color categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. To be considered a basic color category, the term for the color in each language had to meet certain criteria:
It is monolexemic (for example, red, not red-yellow or yellow-red.) It is monomorphemic (for example, blue, but not bluish) Its signification is not included in that of any other color term (for example, crimson is a type of red) Its application must not be restricted to a narrow class of objects (for example, blonde is restricted to hair, wood and beer) It must be psychologically salient for informants (for example, "the color of grandma's freezer" is not psychologically salient for all speakers)
In case of doubt, the following "subsidiary criteria" were implemented: The doubtful form should have the same distributional potential as the previously established basic color terms (for example, objects can be described as reddish but not salmonish) Color terms that are also the name of an object characteristically having that color are suspect, for example, gold, silver and ash Recent foreign loan words may be suspect In cases where lexemic status is difficult to assess, morphological complexity is given some weight as a secondary criterion (for example, red-orange might be questionable)
Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
All languages contain terms for black and white. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both). If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
In addition to following this evolutionary pattern absolutely, each of the languages studied also selected virtually identical focal hues for each color category present. For example, the term for "red" in each of the languages corresponded to roughly the same shade in the Munsell color system. Consequently, they posited that the cognition, or perception, of each color category is also universal.