Colour ideophones in African languages: A typological approach

International audience We present the results of a large-scale typological survey of colour-related meanings expressed with ideophones in a sample of 106 African languages from various families and genetic stocks: Chadic, Cushitic (Afroasiatic), Khoe-Kwadi (Khoisan), Adamawa, Atlantic, Bantu, Dogon, Gur, Kordofanian, Kru, Kwa, Mande, Mel, Ubangi (Niger-Congo), Central Sudanic, Eastern Sudanic (Nilo-Saharan), and Songhai (varia). The data was mostly extracted from the RefLex online lexical database (Segerer & Flavier 2011-2018) by searching colours terms via translations together with grammatical categories. We will first discuss methodological issues related to the use of a lexical database for the purpose of discovering ideophones since there is a great diversity of terminology in the sources. We will discuss the decisions we took for retrieval purposes, specifically the issue of selecting items not labelled as ideophones. Such items were included insofar as they were formally and/or semantically akin to Ameka’s (2001: 26) working definition of ideophones. That includes:a) terms labelled as ideophones by the authors: pééb ideo. ‘very white’ (Akoose); jɔŋ ideo. ‘brown’ (Mende)b) terms labelled differently but fitting in with the working definition: pələk-pələkà adj. ‘very black’ (Bade, Chadic); córí adv.expr. ‘very red, bright red’ (Bambara, Mande); pál interjection ‘pure white’ (Bedik, Atlantic-North); ná tápatápa onom. ‘dark black’ (Duala, Bantu); kàrù adverb (degree modifier) ‘really red’ (Ma’di, Central Sudanic)c) any lexical item lacking the mention of its word category, and which combines specifically with a colour term, e.g. coy ‘in intensive expressions yeeq coy – yaxig coy to be very red; to be bright red’ (Wolof, Atlantic-North).We will then present the genetic and areal patterns of the some 1,000 ideophones (leaving out ‘multicoloured’, ‘spotted’ and the like) found in our sample, as well as their skewed distribution across the spectrum, and their semantic properties, especially their intensifying or attenuative function of “basic” colour terms.Since ideophones have been long claimed as being difficult to borrow (e.g. Childs 1994), but recently disclaimed as potentially borrowable because of the low degree of their morphosyntactic integration (Dingemanse 2017), we will end our presentation by the discussion of a specific case of lexical diffusion via borrowings from Fula within the Macro Sudan Belt area (Güldemann 2017) concerning the colours ‘black’, ‘white’ and ‘red’. It is possible to hypothesize the origin of the diffusion: in each case, only one language, namely Fula (Atlantic-North), in fact a cluster of languages spoken by nomadic people, are or have been in contact with the other 25 languages belonging to four branches of Niger-Congo (Atlantic-North, Mande, Dogon and Adamawa), to one Songhay (Varia) variety, and to one branch of Afro-Asiatic (Chadic).