English and Swedish Color Terms: An Investigation of Common Color Terms, Prototypes, and Color Boundaries in English and Swedish
(2025) SPVR01 20251Master's Programme: Language and Linguistics
Division of English Studies
- Abstract
- In a study by Brent Berlin & Paul Kay from 1969 it was found that there are 11 basic color terms and 7 stages of color evolution. Since then, there have been many follow-up studies within the field to confirm or deny this finding. Some have argued against only including 11 terms in the category of basic while others have criticized the criteria they used for basicness. Some have proposed that there is a connection between a community’s technological development and the amount of basic color terms they use while others claim that these evolutionary stages do not exist at all. Because of this, some critical questions for the field are whether the domain of color has semantic universals or is relative in the world’s languages and if the... (More)
- In a study by Brent Berlin & Paul Kay from 1969 it was found that there are 11 basic color terms and 7 stages of color evolution. Since then, there have been many follow-up studies within the field to confirm or deny this finding. Some have argued against only including 11 terms in the category of basic while others have criticized the criteria they used for basicness. Some have proposed that there is a connection between a community’s technological development and the amount of basic color terms they use while others claim that these evolutionary stages do not exist at all. Because of this, some critical questions for the field are whether the domain of color has semantic universals or is relative in the world’s languages and if the maximum amount of basic color terms in a language truly is only 11. This research aims to compare the most frequently used color terms in English and Swedish, the prototypes for each of these, and the boundaries between the basic color terms in these two languages. By comparing two languages that are close geographically and genealogically similar, a case can be made for whether there is a connection between color usage and technological development and if languages at the final stage of Berlin & Kay’s (1969) evolutionary stages encode color in the same manner. This was done using a free listing task, a prototype task, and a boundary task with the Munsell Color Chart as a stimulus, all classic methods in color terminology research. The data from these tasks shows that while English and Swedish have the same basic color terms, there are differences in the prototypes and boundaries between these colors. For example, the colors red/röd and blue/blå have the same prototype in the two languages while pink/rosa and brown/brun have different ones. Most of the basic color terms also have very similar boundaries in Swedish and English with the exceptions of brown/brun and yellow/gul. Overall, Swedish speakers display less consensus in how they encode color than English speakers. This result allows for arguments for both universalism and relativism, but above both theories, the results support that color terminology and its encodement is subject to a lot of individual differences. The results of the study also suggest that there are secondary colors in both English and Swedish, turquoise/turkos, maroon, and beige, that could potentially be included in the category of basic colors. Further studies should be conducted on whether these terms should be considered basic based on whether speakers include them in other basic color terms or not. More research of technologically advanced societies should also be done to discover more about how the color space is encoded by means of basic color terminology. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9250698
- author
- Briskog, Nellie LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- SPVR01 20251
- year
- 2025
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- language
- English
- id
- 9250698
- date added to LUP
- 2026-09-16 16:22:02
- date last changed
- 2026-09-16 16:22:02
@misc{9250698,
abstract = {{In a study by Brent Berlin & Paul Kay from 1969 it was found that there are 11 basic color terms and 7 stages of color evolution. Since then, there have been many follow-up studies within the field to confirm or deny this finding. Some have argued against only including 11 terms in the category of basic while others have criticized the criteria they used for basicness. Some have proposed that there is a connection between a community’s technological development and the amount of basic color terms they use while others claim that these evolutionary stages do not exist at all. Because of this, some critical questions for the field are whether the domain of color has semantic universals or is relative in the world’s languages and if the maximum amount of basic color terms in a language truly is only 11. This research aims to compare the most frequently used color terms in English and Swedish, the prototypes for each of these, and the boundaries between the basic color terms in these two languages. By comparing two languages that are close geographically and genealogically similar, a case can be made for whether there is a connection between color usage and technological development and if languages at the final stage of Berlin & Kay’s (1969) evolutionary stages encode color in the same manner. This was done using a free listing task, a prototype task, and a boundary task with the Munsell Color Chart as a stimulus, all classic methods in color terminology research. The data from these tasks shows that while English and Swedish have the same basic color terms, there are differences in the prototypes and boundaries between these colors. For example, the colors red/röd and blue/blå have the same prototype in the two languages while pink/rosa and brown/brun have different ones. Most of the basic color terms also have very similar boundaries in Swedish and English with the exceptions of brown/brun and yellow/gul. Overall, Swedish speakers display less consensus in how they encode color than English speakers. This result allows for arguments for both universalism and relativism, but above both theories, the results support that color terminology and its encodement is subject to a lot of individual differences. The results of the study also suggest that there are secondary colors in both English and Swedish, turquoise/turkos, maroon, and beige, that could potentially be included in the category of basic colors. Further studies should be conducted on whether these terms should be considered basic based on whether speakers include them in other basic color terms or not. More research of technologically advanced societies should also be done to discover more about how the color space is encoded by means of basic color terminology.}},
author = {{Briskog, Nellie}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{English and Swedish Color Terms: An Investigation of Common Color Terms, Prototypes, and Color Boundaries in English and Swedish}},
year = {{2025}},
}