I have never noticed the effect that you mention, possibly because I don't go around smashing fluorescent lights , but in the absence of specific evidence I am inclined to doubt that the effect is significantly triboluminescent.

What I have to say here is a guess, but next time a bulb breaks in your presence, you might be able to give some opinion concerning which effect is most likely.First consider how the typical fluorescent light works. An electrical discharge increases the energy levels of electrons in their orbitals around atoms. When they drop back to lower energy levels, they give off that energy again, generally in the form of photons are a very particular wavelength, or if you prefer to put it that way, light of a very particular colour. (In practice this usually means more than one colour, but never mind that for now.)

This can be a very efficient way of producing light, but unfortunately most useful forms of such discharge lights largely give off wavelengths which either are in such narrow ranges of colour as to interfere with our proper vision, or they are in the ultraviolet, sometimes very far ultraviolet, which generally is invisible and often dangerously harmful.Fortunately, by this time we know a large range of fluorescent materials that absorb the ultraviolet and fluoresce, giving off a wide range of colours that combine to produce a comfortable white.

One class of discharge lamp that used to be very popular for street lighting used sodium vapour to produce a yellow light which was cheap because the lamps produced it very efficiently, and in any case it was of a wave length to which our eyes are extremely sensitive. However, if you have ever driven under such discharge lamps, you probably found the colour a little uncomfortable, though generally adequate.

Since then more sophisticated discharge lamps have displaced most of the very yellow sodium discharge streetlamps, but the point that interests us here is that sodium vapour also produces ultraviolet efficiently and can be used in fluorescent lamps. Sodium vapour in particular is not significantly poisonous, but in the past fluorescent lamps largely used mercury discharge. Mercury is both far more poisonous and more expensive than sodium. Sodium's well-known chemical reactivity is irrelevant in the small quantities used in the lamps.

It is altogether believable that the discharge vapour in your lamps contains yellow-glowing sodium atoms, the small amount of yellow light getting through the fluorescent layer merely viewing the light a pleasantly "warmer" hue than the pure, rather blueish fluorescence.

I do find it slightly surprising if the yellow glow of the excited vapour lasts long enough when the glass is shattered, for you to detect a yellow flash, but nonetheless, that is my guess at what you saw.

Cheers,

Jon