When a language adds color words, nearly every one adds them in the same order

Linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay studied 98 languages in 1969 and found a near-universal sequence: if a language has only two color terms, they are black and white; the third is always red, then green and yellow, then blue, then brown. Unrelated languages worldwide follow this same order.

— Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution — University of California Press, 1969
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