Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969; ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay.

Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has.

Berlin and Kay posit seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the colors black (dark–cool) and white (light–warm).

However, the constraints in color-term ordering have been substantially loosened, both by Berlin and Kay in later publications, and by various critics.

Barbara Saunders questioned the methodologies of data collection and the cultural assumptions underpinning the research,[1] as has Stephen C.