Areal patterns and colexifications of colour terms in the languages of Africa

Abstract Of all the semantic domains, colour terms have attracted largest amount of attention, notably from a typological point view. However, there is much more to be discovered. A search cross-linguistic lexical database African languages (RefLex) reveals several previously undetected areal colexification patterns and shared lexico-constructional in genetically balanced sample 401 languages. In this paper, we illustrate characteristics terms: (i) spread an feature due common extra-linguistic setting (locust bean – Parkia biglobosa as source yellow ); (ii) two convergence phenomena, one based on pattern including term for water , colexifications ( red ripe vs. green unripe (iii) diffusion ideophones, category which has thus far been considered difficult borrow.