The meaning of colour words in a cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

People in a given speech community have words they need in order to talk easily about things they often want to talk about. Words which have their exact equivalents in all languages can be called, somewhat loosely, 'universal words'. Linguists prefer to call them 'lexical universals': obviously what are really universal are not words as such but only their meanings. Since some words have more than one meaning, if we want to establish what is really universal we need to focus in each case on a specific meaning.