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Part of
Progress in Colour Studies: Cognition, language and beyond
Edited by Lindsay W. MacDonald, Carole P. Biggam and Galina V. Paramei
[Not in series 217] 2018
► pp. 83–106

Chapter 5
Diatopic variation in the referential meaning of the “Italian blues”

| Liverpool Hope University, UK
| University of Verona, Italy
| University of Verona, Italy

Standard Italian blu is unanimously glossed as “dark blue”. In comparison, azzurro is referred to as either “light blue” or “medium blue” in different studies. We explored diatopic variation (linguistic variation on a geographical level) in the denotata of blu, azzurro and celeste “sky blue” in a psycholinguistic experiment conducted in Verona (Veneto region) and Alghero (Sardinia). Participants named Munsell chips of the BLUE area. For each blue term, a referential volume of naming consensus colours was fitted by a convex hull visualized in CIELAB space. The referential extents of azzurro and celeste were found to differ markedly between the two regions: Verona participants used azzurro to denote “medium-and-light blue”; in contrast, for a similar colour space extent, Alghero participants used predominantly celeste, with azzurro being constrained to darker “medium blue”. The historical factors are discussed behind the more conservative colour naming in Sardinian dialects compared to mainland Standard Italian.

Keywords: Italian blues, diatopic variation, unconstrained colour naming, referential volume, convex hull
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Stimuli
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1The diversity of elaborated blue terms in the two Italian speaker samples
    • 3.2Referential volumes of blu, azzurro and celeste
    • 3.3The centroids of convex hulls and of focal colours for the three “Italian blues”
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Divergence of the referential meanings of azzurro and celeste in the two regiolects
    • 4.2The historical background of naming the BLUE area in Italian
    • 4.3An insight into the prominence of celeste in the Algherese Catalan dialect
    • 4.4Diatopic variation of colour term usage and its referential meaning: Parallels in other languages
      • 4.4.1Partition of the BLUE category: Azul and celeste in Spanish dialects
      • 4.4.2Variation in the lexicalization of the BROWN category in regiolects and dialects
      • 4.4.3 Rosa versus pink : A marginal sub-category in contemporary Germanic languages and dialects
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.217.05par
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