Galician Colour Semantics: An Investigation of Basic Colour Terms

Contemporary Linguistics has performed intensive worldwide research into Colour Semantics to explore the influence of language in cognition. This project makes an original contribution by investigating a hitherto unresearched and endangered language: Galician (northwest Spain). It focuses on the dwindling number of monolingual speakers and compares their Basic Colour Terms with those of younger speakers in contact with global languages such as Spanish and English. Drawing on the methodology of the World Color Survey, 104 informants from 13 municipalities will be interviewed to provide data for analysis. Diachronic research for the 17th-20th centuries will use historical dictionaries and place-name evidence.