Names for colors vary widely across languages, but color categories are remarkably consistent. Shared mechanisms of color perception help explain consistent partitions of visible light into discrete color vocabularies. But the mappings from colors to words are not identical across languages, which may reflect communicative needs—how often speakers must refer to objects of different color. Here we quantify the communicative needs of colors in 130 different languages by developing an inference algorithm for this problem. We find that communicative needs are not uniform: Some regions of color space exhibit 30-fold greater demand for communication than other regions. The regions of greatest demand correlate with the colors of salient objects, including ripe fruits in primate diets. Our analysis also reveals a hidden diversity in the communicative needs of colors across different languages, which is partly explained by differences in geographic location and the local biogeography of linguistic communities. Accounting for language-specific, nonuniform communicative needs improves predictions for how a language maps colors to words, and how these mappings vary across languages. Our account closes an important gap in the compression theory of color naming, while opening directions to study cross-cultural variation in the need to communicate different colors and its impact on the cultural evolution of color categories.

颜色的名称因语言而异，但颜色类别非常一致。颜色感知的共享机制有助于将可见光的一致划分解释为离散的颜色词汇。但是不同语言之间从颜色到单词的映射并不相同，这可能反映了交际需求——说话者必须多频繁地提及不同颜色的对象。在这里，我们通过为此问题开发推理算法来量化 130 种不同语言中颜色​​的交流需求。我们发现交流需求并不统一：色彩空间的某些区域比其他区域表现出 30 倍的交流需求。需求最大的区域与显着物体的颜色相关，包括灵长类动物饮食中的成熟果实。我们的分析还揭示了不同语言的颜色交流需求中隐藏的多样性，部分原因是地理位置和语言社区的当地生物地理学的差异。考虑到特定于语言的、非统一的交流需求，可以改进对语言如何将颜色映射到单词以及这些映射如何因语言而异的预测。我们的帐户弥补了颜色命名压缩理论中的一个重要空白，同时开辟了研究跨文化变异的方向，需要传达不同的颜色及其对颜色类别文化演变的影响。不统一的交流需求提高了对语言如何将颜色映射到单词以及这些映射如何因语言而异的预测。我们的帐户弥补了颜色命名压缩理论中的一个重要空白，同时开辟了研究跨文化变异的方向，需要传达不同的颜色及其对颜色类别文化演变的影响。不统一的交流需求提高了对语言如何将颜色映射到单词以及这些映射如何因语言而异的预测。我们的帐户弥补了颜色命名压缩理论中的一个重要空白，同时开辟了研究跨文化变异的方向，需要传达不同的颜色及其对颜色类别文化演变的影响。