The Existence and Mapping of Colour Terms in Dravidian Languages.

Abstract

Typological patterns of basic colour terms exhibit eleven colour prototypes in the English language and other languages (Berlin & Kay, 1969). Berlin and Kay’s pioneering work on the universality of basic colour terms did not include major Dravidian languages. (Kapp 2004) attempted to study the basic colour terms in South Dravidian tribal languages. In the current work, we have attempted to review the monolexmic colour hypothesis and the existence of these proposed colour terms in Dravidian colloquially spoken languages and to map them from a vision sciences perspective. Visual psychophysical tools were used in the experiment by recruiting n=20 participants of four L1 mother tongue language in the experiment. The Colour naming task, colour mapping task and stoop task was measured in the experiment. It is found that the monolexmic colour terms hypothesis proposed for the English language varies in major Dravidian languages and the majority of colour terms are restricted to seven to eight colours. Interestingly few colour terms were found in some similarity among the Dravidian languages.