Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa

Abstract Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted the largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point of view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search of the cross-linguistic lexical database of African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional patterns in a genetically balanced sample of 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate several areal characteristics of colour terms: (i) the spread of an areal feature due to a common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean – Parkia biglobosa – as the lexical source of yellow); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on a shared lexico-constructional pattern including a term for water, and one based on shared colexifications (red and ripe vs. green and unripe); and (iii) an areal pattern of lexical diffusion of colour ideophones, a category which has thus far been considered difficult to borrow.