Florence “blues” are clothed in triple basic terms

Psycholinguistic studies provide evidence that Italian has more than one basic colour term (BCT) for ‘blue’: consensually, blu denotes ‘dark blue’, while ‘light-and-medium blue’, with diatopic variation, is termed either azzurro or celeste. For Florence speakers, the BLUE area is argued to linguistically differentiate between azzurro ‘medium blue’ and celeste ‘light blue’. We scrutinised the basicness of the three terms. Participants (N=31; University students/graduates born in Tuscany) named each chip of eight Munsell charts encompassing the BLUE area (5BG-5PB) using an unconstrained colour-naming method. They then indicated the “best exemplar” (focal colour) of blu, azzurro and celeste. We found that frequencies of the three terms and of term derivatives were comparable. Referential meaning of blu, azzurro and celeste was estimated in CIELAB space as L*a*b*-coordinates of the mean of focal colours and as “modal” categories, i.e. dispersion around the mean. The three ‘blue’ terms were distinct on both measures and separated along all three CIELAB dimensions but predominantly along the L*-dimension. Our results provide evidence that Florence speakers require all three terms for naming the BLUE area, categorically refined along the lightness dimension. Furthermore, celeste appears to be a third BCT for ‘blue’, along with commonly considered BCTs azzurro and blu.