COLOR TERMS IN SETSWANA - A LINGUISTIC AND PERCEPTUAL APPROACH

A field study of the color lexicon of Setswana, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana in Southern Africa, was designed to establish what the "basic" terms of Setswana are, in order to further test Berlin and Kay's (1969) theory of color universals. Our informants were monolingual rural adults, tested in their villages. The study was in two stages; in stage one we elicited color terms using a list procedure and tried to establish their range and focus in color space, The 11 most frequently offered terms that also had unrestricted range of reference (for example, excluding terms only used to describe cattle) were used in the second stage, a color-mapping procedure. A combination of perceptual and linguistic measures converged to suggest that Setswana probably has six basic terms, which may be glossed as 'white', 'black', 'red', 'grue' (blue and green), 'brown', and 'yellow'. In addition, there is a rich vocabulary of restricted terms that mainly describe cattle. The basic terms established are consistent with the Berlin and Kay hierarchy, except that there is no suggestion of separate blue and green terms, even though 'brown' is definitely present.