In this paper, we investigate colour naming in French and Occitan. While the use of primary terms is common in these languages, both have secondary colour terms derived by way of suffixation, such as, for instance, the suffixes -astre in Occitan and -âtre in French, which carry an approximative meaning comparable to ish in greenish. However, it is well-known that French, compared to other Romance languages, has a tendency to be very analytic. This raises the following question: do speakers of French and other Romance languages (here, Occitan) differ in morphological strategies used to express meaning in the semantic domain of colour? To answer it, we compare the colour descriptions provided by speakers of French (N = 20) and speakers of Occitan (N = 20). The results show some striking differences between the two languages in morphosyntactic strategies used to name colours. Speakers of Occitan employ secondary colour terms using a variety of derivational suffixes, which are absent from the French data, despite their existence in the language.