Color Categories in Language Contact: ‘Pygmy’ Hunter-Gatherers and Bantu Farmers

Abstract

<p>When speakers adopt colors from another language, do they only borrow certain lexical forms or do they absorb whole concepts? And if both a lexical term and a color category are borrowed, are they both borrowed at the same time or is one of them borrowed first? In this paper, I address the question of how color categories are borrowed, providing evidence from Gyeli ‘Pygmy’ hunter-gatherers (PHGs) in contact with Bantu farmers in southern Cameroon. The data shows rich variability in borrowing patterns. Color categories are not borrowed in toto, but only partially, i.e. the resulting color category in the recipient language only partially coincides with the color category in the donor language. Further, the borrowing of a color category may or may not be in conjunction with the borrowing of a color term from the recipient language. While Gyeli PHGs borrow a lexical term first from neighboring Bantu farmer languages and then expand the color category in a second step, the path of borrowing of Bantu farmers from colonial languages is the inverse. Farmer languages first adopt a new color category, but reject loanwords. Their second step in acquiring a new color is to find a name for the new color category.</p>