Color naming across languages reflects color use

What determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show that despite gross differences across languages, communication of chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than cool colors (blues/greens). We present...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2017-10, Vol.114 (40), p.10785-10790
Main Authors:	Gibson, Edward, Futrell, Richard, Jara-Ettinger, Julian, Mahowald, Kyle, Bergen, Leon, Ratnasingam, Sivalogeswaran, Gibson, Mitchell, Piantadosi, Steven T., Conway, Bevil R.
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Analysis Biological Sciences Color Information theory Language Languages Naming Salience Social Sciences Statistical analysis Statistics Yellows
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	What determines how languages categorize colors? We analyzed results of the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages to show that despite gross differences across languages, communication of chromatic chips is always better for warm colors (yellows/reds) than cool colors (blues/greens). We present an analysis of color statistics in a large databank of natural images curated by human observers for salient objects and show that objects tend to have warm rather than cool colors. These results suggest that the cross-linguistic similarity in color-naming efficiency reflects colors of universal usefulness and provide an account of a principle (color use) that governs how color categories come about. We show that potential methodological issues with the WCS do not corrupt information-theoretic analyses, by collecting original data using two extreme versions of the color-naming task, in three groups: the Tsimane’, a remote Amazonian hunter-gatherer isolate; Bolivian-Spanish speakers; and English speakers. These data also enabled us to test another prediction of the color-usefulness hypothesis: that differences in color categorization between languages are caused by differences in overall usefulness of color to a culture. In support, we found that color naming among Tsimane’ had relatively low communicative efficiency, and the Tsimane’ were less likely to use color terms when describing familiar objects. Color-naming among Tsimane’ was boosted when naming artificially colored objects compared with natural objects, suggesting that industrialization promotes color usefulness.
ISSN:	0027-8424 1091-6490