The semantic field of colour through the eyes of three generations

It is widely held that named colour categories in the world's languages are organized around universal focal colours, or prototypes. This paper examines this semantic field in Galician oral use. We chose five Galician-speaking families in the villages of Xesteira and Almofrei that had members pertaining to three generations. Twenty two interviews were carried out and provide the lexical material discussed in this study, which thus attempts to present the colour categories in a Galician micro-community, track linguistic changes and document their semantic consequences. As the younger generations move towards greater lexical homogeneity, they show a preference for terms learned at school over the words they heard at their grandmother's knee, and establish more clearcut categories along the colour continuum. Spanish language contact has contaminated the colour lexicon with Castilian forms or new meanings for inherited terms. We document the route followed by words through three generations, the disuse into which some forms have fallen and the recovery of others as a consequence of bringing Galician into the school curriculum.