Learning Turkish Color Names Through Crowdsourcing

Abstract

This study explored common Turkish color names and their denotative meanings to facilitate color communication within and across languages. An internet-based psycholinguistic experiment was conducted (available at: colornaming.net) using an unconstrained color-naming method with the following objectives: (a) to collect Turkish color names in wide cultural use and determine their corresponding color ranges; (b) to estimate color coordinates of centroids of 11 Turkish basic color terms (BCTs), as well as of an emerging BCT lacivert ‘navy blue’, and compare them to the 11 English BCTs estimated earlier using the same web-based psycholinguistic experiment; and (c) to establish an “indispensable” set of Turkish color terms required for complete coverage of the color gamut. Native speakers of Turkish, recruited as volunteers from crowdsourcing (N = 637), named freely a sequence of randomly selected colors from 606 samples approximately uniformly distributed in CIELAB color space. Results showed a large color lexicon of unique 268 color descriptors, each offered by more than one observer. The centroids of the 11 Turkish BCTs showed high correspondence with their English counterparts (mean ΔE₀₀ < 3) except for mavi ‘blue’, which differed more substantially from blue (ΔE₀₀ = 8.5), while the difference between lacivert and blue was even greater (ΔE₀₀ = 21.2). Frequency, naming consensus, and denotative certainty of lacivert support its classification as a 12th BCT in Turkish. An analysis for identifying the minimal set of color terms (CTs) that can name all colors across the full color gamut revealed, in total, 30 Turkish indispensable lexical color categories that enable efficient inter-language communication.