Albanian and English Colour idioms as a means of reflecting cultural identity and national mentality
Albanian and English Colour idioms as a means of reflecting cultural identity and national mentality

Summary/Abstract: Different languages lead their speakers to different conceptualizations of the same extralinguistic reality, which seems to be most evident in the way that reality is segmented by the lexicon. Although sensory information is processed similarly across cultures, languages encode this information differently. The lexicon influences its speakers’ cultural patterns of thought and perception in various ways as a culture-specific segmentation of the extralinguistic reality, the frequency of occurrence of specific lexical items or the existence of keywords or key word combinations revealing core cultural values. The desire to be authentic, irreplaceable and culturally bound permeates every aspect of linguistic creation and production, idioms are no exception. They are distinguishable product of their immediate context and do not obviously obey universal rules. The aim of this scientific paper is to conduct a contrastive analysis of English and Albanian color idioms as to emphasise some of the striking differences in the conceptual grounds on which these linguistic units are based. These differences cannot be fully understood outside the context of the cultures in which they are inextricably embedded. The scope of the research is to survey the vast realm of colour idioms as culture-specific expressions, reflecting how two communities speaking different languages have partitioned reality covering the physical world, past experiences, customs, traditions, and prejudices that are deeply embedded in everyday speech.

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