What is the relative resilience of perceptual categories and concepts in the midst of language obsolescence and cultural change? This paper considers data from Umpila, a moribund language, today spoken by only a handful of elderly speakers. The vernacular of this community is an English based creole. Based on the Language of Perception field tasks, relative perceptual ineffability in Umpila can be broadly characterised into two mutually exclusive systems: (1) perceptual domains with established systems of domain-specific lexicon which do not account/cover for the entire domain’s perceptual space and (2) perceptual domains which employ all-purpose quality lexicon that can be readily applied across an entire perceptual domain, but lack the additional codable precision that domain-specific lexicon affords a speaker. This all-purpose lexicon most often consists of antonym pairs, such as good-bad and big-small. In this paper these different strategies will be examined within two visual perceptual modalities, colour and shape.

Data gathered from the Language of Perception tasks, supplementary tasks and discourse data reveal that both these types of ineffability can be propped up or supported by salient domains outside the perceptual realm or by other communicative resources. In particular this paper will look at the employment of kin categories to fill ‘gaps’ in the colour spectrum and the expression of shape specificity through simultaneous co-speech gesture.