The Russian colour lexicon and its diatopic variation: elicited lists, cognitive salience of colour terms, and neologism boom

We used a colour-term elicitation task to study the Russian colour inventory and compare the regiolects of young native speakers from Kazan (NK = 112) and Smolensk (NS = 143), two cities in European Russia about 2000 km apart. In Kazan, 362 unique terms were elicited, and in Smolensk, 423. Zipf-functions of term frequency and the Cognitive Salience Index based on the frequencies of terms and their positions in participants’ colour-term lists indicated the predominance of 12 Russian basic colour terms (BCTs), including two ‘blues’: sinij and goluboj. Other frequent, salient terms included an emerging BCT: birûzovyj ‘turquoise’. The core colour inventory was highly consistent across the two samples; by contrast, less frequent terms showed slight regional variation, likely reflecting differences in the local chromatic “visual diet”. The results highlight an ongoing process of lexical refinement within specific areas of colour space. Socio-cultural factors since the 1990s have spurred a surge of colour neologisms and non-canonical noun forms of Russian colour names. Russian developments align with broader cross-language tendencies in the enrichment of colour inventories, a process driven by cultural transmission in an increasingly globalised world.