Italian blues: does bilingualism modulate color categories?

In the present study we explored a possible semantic shift of focal colours for ‘blue’ in Italian-English bilinguals. Recent psycholinguistic studies provide accumulated evidence that Italian has more than one BCT for ‘blue’, in accord with the weak relativity hypothesis. Notably, the number of the ‘blue’ BCTs appears to vary between regions exposed to different Italian dialects [cf. 12]: in Verona (Veneto region) the two identified BCTs are azzurro ‘azure, light blue’ and blu ‘dark blue’ [13-14]; in comparison, three BCTs denoting the BLUE area of colour space, celeste ‘sky blue, light blue’, azzurro ‘medium blue’ and and blu ‘dark blue’, are demonstrated for speakers in Florence (Tuscany) [15-16] and Alghero (Algherese Catalan dialect, Sardinia) [17]. The multiple Italian ‘blues’ are conjectured to have emerged in response to the cognitive need to differentiate between the colours of the sky and the water of the Mediterranean Sea [18,19].