Dr. Brent Berlin is an anthropologist in the Department of Ecological and Environmental Anthropology at the University of Georgia. He is most famous for his work with linguist Paul Kay on colour: Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) ISBN 1575861623. Berlin and Kay's work helped provide evidence that the color terms a culture has (e.g., black, brown, red) are predictable by how many color terms the culture has. There are seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the colors black and white (or light and dark) and Stage VII having more than six basic color terms. The English language falls into Stage VII with eleven basic color terms. Since there seems to be a strong positive correlation between number of basic color terms and complexity of environment, it would seem to suggest that this is evidence of the evolution of language (which until recently has been ignored or dismissed by traditional Structural linguists.)

American anthropologists | Members and associates of the US National Academy of Sciences | University of Georgia faculty