Languages show variations in their basic color terms [Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1969]. Evidence for languages that have or lack basic color terms mainly comes from standardized naming tasks [The World Color Survey. Stanford, CA: CSLI; 2010]. In this article, we take a somewhat different perspective on the issue of color naming in languages. Starting from a language, Malayalam, with a limited number of basic color terms, and thus with a mixed color naming system, we ask how language users behave when they are asked to produce spontaneous narratives in a communicative setting in which color is manipulated systematically. Do narrators behave as predicted by naming task results and grammars, or do they behave (systematically) differently? In this article, we explore how two different color naming settings affect the expression of colors that have basic color terms in contrast with nonbasic terms. For this purpose, a color naming task was administered to validate basic and nonbasic color terms in Malayalam. The result showed that Malayalam has six colors considered simple color terms (e.g., chuvappu ‘red’) and five complex color terms (e.g., tavittu‐niram brown “color of rice bran”). This result was used to develop eight short stories in two color term conditions. The color terms extracted out from “naturalistic narratives” were more varied than those that were predicted by the color naming task. In the Malayalam primary color condition, respondents often used complex constructions rather than simple color terms only [e.g., chuvappu niram(ulla)]. In the secondary color condition, respondents, as expected, used more complex constructions, but they also avoided complex constructions in interesting ways. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 42, 193–202, 2017

Through an unconstrained colour-naming task, researchers have found that bilinguals possess greater colour vocabulary knowledge than monolinguals. In the current study, we explore the colour-naming behavior of bilinguals in spontaneous speech scenarios. The native language of these bilinguals holds complex colour labels for most of the colours, for which the second language holds only basic colour terms. For this purpose, a story narration task was developed where eight stories were designed with elementary and mixed colour conditions. Two groups of participants took part in the study: (a) 44 monolingual speakers and (b) 32 Malayalam-English bilinguals. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that there were clear colour label differences between the basic colour terms in English and Malayalam and those labeled by bilingual speakers. Bilingual speakers use translation equivalents of Malayalam colour terms for English colours.