According to B. Berlin and P. Kay’s classic theory of the universality of colour terms, the basic colour lexicon in various languages of the world must historically have passed through certain universal evolutionary stages of development in the appropriate order. The article aims to contribute to the study of questions related to the evolution of colour term systems characterized by macrocolours, which depict the main parts of the spectrum of blue, green and yellow. The linguistic representation of such systems is featured by the designation of blue-green, or yellow-green, or blue-yellow-green parts of the spectrum by means of one term. The study shows that in the 20th century, significant number of the languages of Eurasia were characterized by the existence of the blue-green colour system. It can be assumed that the reason for the destruction of such systems in the languages of the European part of the continent was the close interaction with the native speakers of the Iranian, Volga and Perm languages in the Seljuk and Bulgar States. The situation was different for the languages geographically located in Siberia, where the Turkic and Tungusic languages, with their blue-green systems, had an assimilating effect on speakers of the Samoyed and Ob-Ugric languages, for which in the 18th century the yellow-green-blue system was recorded, which became blue-green for the majority of the speakers by the 20th century. Our analysis of the changes is based on the actual fixations of the relevant linguistic phenomena in dictionaries and written documents. It shows how the systems with macrocolours evolved, outlies the areas of their distribution and explains the evolutionary processes caused by the intensive interlanguage contacts, the study of which yields two possible scenarios for the development of the systems of colour terms.