Preliminary research on Turkish basic colour terms with an emphasis on blue

This paper describes and discusses list and naming experiments designed to ascertain whether Turkish lacivert “dark blue” is a Basic Colour Term (BCT). In addition to the standard sixty-five Color-aid tiles selected by Davies and Corbett (1995), seventeen additional tiles from the purple-blue region of colour space were used for these tasks. Measured against Urmas Sutrop’s cognitive salience index (Sutrop 2001), lacivert attained high salience in the list task. However, the combined results suggest eleven Turkish BCTs (excluding lacivert): yeşil “green”, sarı “yellow”, siyah “black”, kırmızı “red”, mavi “blue”, beyaz “white”, mor “purple”, kahverengi “brown”, pembe “pink”, turuncu “orange” and gri “grey”. Lacivert remains a BCT candidate due to the additional tile used in the naming task, which emerged as dominant.