The categorisation of orange in Galician

Important differences in the categorisation and labelling of orange were found in data collected in 2021 from two generations of Galician speakers. Young adults strongly agreed on orange being an independent category labelled laranxa (‘orange’) or its Spanish cognate naranja. Elderly participants had much lower consensus rates. Some shared the semantic extension and the label(s) of their young counterparts while others used the label color butano (‘butane gas bottle-coloured’) for highly saturated orange samples alone. Half of them, however, used categories such as red+orange (labelled encarnado, roxo or the Spanish cognate rojo), yellow+orange (amarelo, marelo or the Spanish cognate amarillo) and pink+orange (rosa). These contrasts suggest two stages of linguistic assimilation towards Spanish and illustrate the increasing linguistic pressure that Galician faces in a diglossic context.