Over the years since the publication of Berlin and Kay's Basic Color Terms (Berlin and Kay 1969), an impressive amount of anthropological and linguistic research has been accumulating on the topic of color categorization and naming in different languages of the world (see Maffi 1991 for a bibliographic coverage of the period 1970–1990; many new titles should be added as of 1997). Linguistic ethnographers have probed the Berlin and Kay (henceforth B&K) universalist–evolutionary framework against the data from scores of different languages, and have brought confirmation to it in varying degrees, or questioned it on various grounds (see review of the literature in Maffi 1990a). A steady flow of research has come from B&K themselves and their collaborators (Berlin and Berlin 1975; Kay 1975; Kay and McDaniel 1978; Berlin, Kay, and Merrifield 1985; Maffi 1988a, 1988b; Kay, Berlin, and Merrifield 1991 [henceforth KB&M]; Kay, Berlin, Maffi, and Merrifield this volume [henceforth KBM&M]). As KBM&M indicate, this research and other findings and conceptual developments in the field have prompted modifications and refinements of the original B&K hypotheses on the universality and evolution of color-term systems. However, the basic tenets have stood the test of time. Alternative methodological approaches and theoretical accounts of the cross-linguistic findings on color terminology have also been proposed, still in a universalist–evolutionary framework (in particular, MacLaury's “vantage theory”; MacLaury 1986, 1987a, 1991a, 1991b, 1992, this volume).