Colours in tsakhur: First account of the basic colour terms of a Nakh-Daghestanian language

Abstract

We report a study of the colour terms of the Nakh-Daghestanian language Tsakhur, designed to establish the inventory of basic colour terms (BCTs), and to test Berlin & Kay's theory of colour universals on a new language family. Twenty teenagers aged from 10 to 15 years and 19 adults did a colour term list task (write down as many colour terms as you can) and a colour naming task (name 65 representative colour "tiles"). Measures of salience and consensus derived from the two tasks converge to suggest that for adult speakers Tsakhur may have twelve BCTs. Eleven of these match Berlin & Kay's eleven universal terms perfectly, but the twelfth term - alnti:k'a - is the first reported case of a possible BCT for 'turquoise'. While the latter is inconsistent with the original Berlin & Kay (1969) theory, it can easily be accommodated in later versions of the theory. Teenage speakers had just eight BCTs, a subset of the adult BCTs; they had no BCTs for 'brown', 'purple', 'grey', or 'turquoise'. The teenagers appear to be still learning BCTs, which contrasts with English and Russian children who have normally completed this process before they are ten years old. ©Walter de Gruyter.