Historical contact between social groups is well known to cause convergence not only in patterns of cultural practice, but also in the structure of unrelated languages. While a fair amount is known about convergence in grammatical form, less is known about convergence in the semantic distinctions made in the lexicon. Research on the linguistic effects of culture contact often cites isolated examples (e.g., Matisoff has noted that Southeast Asian lexical semantic systems include ‘many verbs for different kinds of carrying’, and lexical idioms like ‘insects in the teeth’ for dental decay, or ‘pig crazy’ for epileptic), but little systematic work has been done. To make a move in this direction, in this talk I compare lexical semantic distinctions in the semantics of the senses in several languages of mainland Southeast Asia, focusing on some of the perceptual categories under investigation in a large-scale comparative project being undertaken by researchers in the Language and Cognition group at MPI Nijmegen, Special attention is paid to data from Lao (Tai), Kri (Vietic), and Cantonese, within the domains of taste, smell, and colour.