The World Color Survey reports the results of the World Color Survey (WCS). The WCS was undertaken in the late 1970s to test the hypotheses of Berlin and Kay's 1969 monograph, Basic Color Terms: (1) there are universal constraints on basic color names in the world's languages, and (2) languages tend to add, but not loose, basic color terms, and to do so in a partially fixed order. In each language surveyed a linguist-translator team (or individual) of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International) gathered data on the basic color terms, their mapping to a palette 330 representative Munsell colors, and their 'best example' of ‘focal’ choices for each term. An average of twenty-four speakers in each of 110 unwritten languages, representing half that many different families, served as respondents for the Survey. The respondents were as monolingual as could practicably be obtained under local field circumstances.

The World Color Survey largely substantiates Hypothesis (1) and, while supporting Hypothesis (2) in broad outline, revises in important specifics the Berlin and Kay model of how color-naming systems evolve. The current model admits the possibility of a language with only two color terms -- as previously documented -- but the Survey did not itself document any two-term languages. In such a language, there is one term comprising white and all the ‘warm’ colors (red, orange, yellow, pink,...) and another comprising black and all the ‘cool’ colors (green, blue, purple, ...). A three-term language separates a ‘warm’ term from the earlier white-warm term, producing a system of white, warm and black-cool terms. Further stages of development successively divide these categories until a six-term language comprises separate terms for black, white, red, yellow, green and blue. Terms such as brown, purple, orange, pink and gray, tend to be added late in development, but not at precisely predictable points. Not all languages fit this typology, but a substantial majority do.

The bulk of the book consists in 110 individual-language chapters, each devoted to the analysis of the color terminology system of a single language. Every individual-language chapter contains an analytic summary of the color terminology system, including explanation of which terms are considered to be basic and why and how the system fits into the evolutionary typology – or fails to fit. The analytic summary is supported by a standard series of tables and diagrams detailing the distribution of naming and focal choice patterns among the respondents for the language. (The raw data of the WCS is available on the web at http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/data.html.) The 110 individual language chapters are preceded by chapters dealing with the history of the subject and the methods of the Survey and include details of the data acquisition methods and the development of the classification scheme used to order the various color terminologies.

The book contains 618 pages in 8.5” x 11” format and over 1,000 charts, diagrams and tables.