gems, color science, color theory

Fifty years ago, in 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, launching a groundbreaking research program on color naming and categorization across first-language speakers from diverse ethno-linguistic societies. Over the decades, their work has been widely regarded as one of the most influential contributions to cross-cultural studies—not just in color linguistics but in cognition and language research more broadly. The impact of Berlin and Kay’s work continues to be felt today. Recent advances in quantitative analysis methods and modeling approaches are shedding new light on data sets inspired by their original research. In this review, we revisit the origins of the Basic Color Terms phenomenon and highlight some of the many ongoing studies that continue to yield fascinating insights into color categorization across cultures.