The colour lexicon of the Serbian language - a study of dark blue and dark red colour categories Part 1: Colour-term elicitation task

Abstract

In this study, we linguistically investigated Serbian colour terminology. We administrated colourterm elicitation task aiming to establish the inventory of basic colour terms (BCTs) in the Serbian language and, in particular, to investigate the salience and the status of colour terms teget ‘dark blue’ and bordo ‘dark red’. Native speakers of Serbian (N = 83) participated in a list task (Morgan & Corbett, 1989), in which they had to list as many Serbian colour terms as possible during five minutes. Based on the collected data, we calculated frequency of each term, its mean position and two indexes of salience. Results showed that 11 Serbian most salient colour terms correspond to the eleven BCTs found by Berlin and Kay (1969), namely, plavo ‘blue’, crveno ‘red’, žuto ‘yellow’, zeleno ‘green’, crno ‘black’, belo ‘white’, ljubičasto ‘purple’, narandžasto ‘orange’, sivo ‘grey’, roze ‘pink’, and braon ‘brown’, but that basic status of braon needs to be further examined. Teget ‘dark blue’ and bordo ‘dark red’, along with tirkizno ‘turquoise’ and oker ‘ochre’ were frequently used, with higher salience indices than other non-BCTs. Further research is needed to find out whether teget and bordo meet criteria of BCTs in the Serbian language. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 179033 and Grant no. III47020]

Keywords

• colour terms
• Serbian language
• colour-term elicitation task