The Cultural Symbolism of Colors Using the Example of Yellow

Colour terms behave quite differently across languages, similar to the way in which our psychological interpretation varies in response to reflected visible light. Moving from this general overview to a more precise analysis of the colour terms, this paper investigates the concrete as well as symbolic meaning of the colour yellow in the German language at different stages in the development of this language, from the medieval up to the present day. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the metaphorical uses of the colour yellow, which share the same meanings with other European languages as well as a specific meaning characterizing the German culture. The different meanings and emotional values of the colour yellow are investigated in a corpus from the database of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim). The aim of the present paper is to show that the colour yellow is characterized by intercultural as well as by specific meanings related to the German culture