Comparative Study of English and Fulfulde Colour Terms: A Semantic Perspective

This paper is an attempt to make a comparison between English and Fulfulde colour terms. Despite that the two languages are not from the same linguistic phyla. English language belongs to Indo-European family of the Western Germanic classification while Fulfulde is an African language member of West Atlantic sub-family of Niger-Congo languages family. Colour term is word of phrase that refers to a specific colour or may be refers to human perception of that colour. Colour terms are part of the aspect of semantics in language because it deals with meaning. Semantics is one of the micro branches of linguistics that deals with meaning of words and phrases in languages. The main aim of this study is to make a kind of comparison between English and Fulfulde languages colour terms, the objectives of this study is to examine and analyzed these colour terms, to bring out their similarities and differences and to signify colours meaning symbols. This research applied both interview and observation techniques in gathering data. This study adopts the theoretical framework of Basic Colour Terms that was established by Berlin and Kay in guiding the information collected and twenty five informants were involved in collecting the data at the field. This study found out that, English has eleven different colour terms and Fulfulde is a classical language where it operates seven different colour terms. This study recommends that Linguists and speakers of minority languages should be encouraged to under-take researches into some aspect of semantics and government should sponsored research to encouraged expert of language to carry researches in other aspect of micro and macro linguistics.