Abstract

We explored Turkish colour naming using an Internet-based color naming experiment to: a) collect
colour names in wide cultural use with their corresponding colour ranges and response times, b) to estimate
colour coordinates of centroids of 11 Turkish basic color terms (BCTs) and to compare them to the 11
English BCTs estimated using the same web-experiment, and c) to establish the English equivalents of the
most common Turkish colour names (n>11) based on the distribution of their colour coordinates. Turkish
colour names were mostly monolexemic (61%) and 38.5% of responses were BCTs. The most frequent
responses were the BCTs mor (eq. purple), pembe (eq. pink), mavi (eq. blue), yeşil (eq. green) and sarı (eq.
yellow) followed by the non-basic turkuaz (eq. turquoise) and lila (eq. lilac). Response time analysis
showed that participants responded quicker to sarı, mor, beyaz (eq. white) and siyah (eq. black) than to
other terms. Turkish speakers reached consensus (dominance > 50%) for 25 colour names; sarı had the
most samples named with consensus followed by mor, bordo (eq. burgundy) and lacivet (eq. navy blue).
The comparison between centroids of Turkish and English eleven BCTs showed a very good agreement
(CIEDE2000 distances: mean separation=2.54, standard deviation=1.48).