"A research by Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, and Paul Kay, a linguist. They made the first hypothesis about how color terms enter a language in a certain order. Later, I came across the World Color Survey, which was established in an effort to continue research into Berlin and Kay’s hypothesis. The WCS makes their data available to the public, and I found that this was exactly what I needed to help answer my many questions. The result of the WCS data exploration is below, where about 800,000 individual color chips are grouped by the terms used to describe them. (...) The WCS collected data from 2696 native speakers, representing 110 languages, asking each of them to identify 330 colors. With Processing, I wrote code to read the survey data and explore different ways to categorize and group it. These sketches developed into the final image, where results for each language are shown as a series of blocks that extend from the center, in order of the most frequently used term to the least. For instance, terms used for a greenish-blue color are most prevalent, followed by terms for what we might perceive as red, black, white, etc." - Amira

"The speakers of one language used only three color terms to describe the color spectrum, while others used over sixty. Organizing the languages by geographic location highlights regional similarities in the number of unique color terms. Languages are also grouped by family within each geographic location. (...) Color naming has been a useful tool for understanding the relativist and universalist views because it is ubiquitous. It has practical applications across languages because it can be used to identify food, objects, places, even feelings e.g. the blues. Cultures celebrate the world in many ways, but finding connections that might demonstrate how we see the world in similar ways is an exciting and worthwhile exploration." - Amira

See also: The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains http://ff.im/Z5LfD - Amira