The basic color terms of Russian

Abstract

Berlin and Kay (1969) suggest that languages have a maximum of 11 basic color terms. Russian may be an exception in that it appears to have twelve basic color terms, including two for the blue region of color space. We report a study of Russian color terms, which was carried out to establish the inventory of basic color terms as a test of Berlin and Kay's theory and to clarify the status of the two blue terms. A large representative sample of speakers of Russian performed two tasks: a list task (77 subjects) and a color-naming task (54 subjects). The results from the two tasks converge to indicate that Russian does indeed have twelve basic color terms including the two terms for blue. In addition, plotting the Russian terms in color space and comparing the results with similar work on English allows us to define certain Russian terms more accurately than has been the case previously. © 1994, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.