Learning Turkish Color Names Through Crowdsourcing
Ulusoy, Begüm, Griffin, Lewis and Mylonas, Dimitris (2026) Learning Turkish Color Names Through Crowdsourcing. Color Research and Application. ISSN 0361-2317
Abstract
This study explored common Turkish color names and their denotative meanings to facilitate color communication withinand across languages. An internet-based psycholinguistic experiment was conducted (available at: color naming.net) usingan unconstrained color-naming method with the following objectives: (a) to collect Turkish color names in wide cultural useand 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 usingthe same web-based psycholinguistic experiment; and (c) to establish an “indispensable” set of Turkish color terms requiredfor 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 CIELABcolor 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) exceptfor mavi ‘blue’, which differed more substantially from blue (ΔE00 = 8.5), while the difference between lacivert and bluewas even greater (ΔE00 = 21.2). Frequency, naming consensus, and denotative certainty of lacivert support its classificationas a 12th BCT in Turkish. An analysis for identifying the minimal set of color terms (CTs) that can name all colors acrossthe full color gamut revealed, in total, 30 Turkish indispensable lexical color categories that enable efficient inter-languagecommunication.
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