Redrawing the margins of language: Lessons from research on ideophones

2018/01/09 by Mark Dingemanse · 1 voice · 156 citations
Psychology · #Anthropology #Categorization, perception, and language #Iconicity #Language family #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistic typology #Linguistics #Multisensory perception and integration #Narrative #Onomatopoeia #Philosophy #Psychology #Sociology #Sound symbolism #Typology

paper · pdf · doi:10.5334/gjgl.444

published in Glossa a journal of general linguistics 3(1) (Ubiquity Press)

openalex publication_date 2018/01/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

Ideophones (also known as expressives, mimetics or onomatopoeia) have been systematically studied in linguistics since the 1850s, when they were first described as a lexical class of vivid sensory words in West-African languages. This paper surveys the research history of ideophones, from its roots in African linguistics to its fruits in language description and linguistic theory around the globe. It shows that despite a recurrent narrative of marginalization, scholars working on ideophones have made important advances in our understanding of sensory language, iconicity, lexical typology, and morphosyntax. Due to their dual nature as vocal gestures that grow roots in linguistic systems, ideophones provide opportunities to reframe typological questions, reconsider the role of language ideology in linguistic scholarship, and rethink the margins of language. With ideophones increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences, this review synthesizes past theoretical insights and empirical findings in order to enable future work to build on them.

Cited by

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Discussions

• the hegemony of English is fairly recent, so anyone who wants to dig into foundational issues must work multilingually. E.g. these two paragraphs in my 2018 review of the history of ideophone research [bsky, 13 points, 1 comments]

Related

• Ideophones (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes)
• Expressiveness and system integration: On the typology of ideophones, with special reference to Siwu
• ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept
• The enactive iconicity of ideophone semantics
• “How do you even know what ideophones mean?”