Rosa Schätze – Pink zum kaufen

Over the past decades, English has had a strong influence on the German language, including the introduction of new words, among them the colour term pink. A first study (Frenzel 2006) investigated German speakers’ perception of rosa/pink as two separate colours rather than different shades of the same colour. The results suggested that pink was causing a shift in the semantic scope of the German colour term rosa. In order to further investigate this change in progress, a corpus of six popular magazines has been compiled since 2006. To objectively determine the application of the two colour terms and their status in German, instances of pink and rosa were selected on the basis of visual support from illustrative material in the magazines. The interpretation of the corpus takes semantic, connotative, contextual, and, particularly, stylistic considerations into account to ascertain the level of basicness of pink in the German language.