41st European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) 2018 Trieste

Standard Italian has more than one ‘blue’ basic colour term: Blu is unanimously glossed as ‘dark blue’; azzurro, however, is referred to as ‘light blue’ or ‘medium blue’.We explored diatopic variation in denotata of blu, azzurro and celeste ‘sky blue’ in a psycholinguistic experiment conducted in Verona (Veneto region) and Alghero (Sardinia). Participants named Munsell chips (N ¼ 237) of the BLUE area. For each ‘blue’ term, a referential volume of colours with naming consensus was fitted by a convex hull visualised in CIELAB space. We found that the referential extents of azzurro and celeste differ markedly between the two regions: Verona speakers denote ‘light-andmedium blue’ by azzurro; in contrast, Alghero speakers use mainly celeste for the same extent. Conceivably, the contact-induced prominence of celeste for the latter was reinforced by the insularity and conservatism of the Algherese Catalan dialect to the detriment of the low-consensus usage and referential extent of azzurro.