A description tells us what to imagine. A depiction tries to make part of the experience happen in the act of telling.
— Tymur Levitin
Imagine someone walking across a room.
You can describe the movement:
He walked unsteadily.
The sentence is clear.
It tells us what happened and how the person moved.
Now imagine that instead of merely describing the movement, the speaker produces a distinctive rhythmic expression, changes their voice, perhaps moves their body, and gives the listener something resembling a miniature performance of the movement.
The listener is no longer receiving only a description.
They are being invited to experience an aspect of the movement through the form of the utterance itself.
This is not necessarily imitation of a sound.
Walking unsteadily does not produce one universal noise that a word could reproduce.
What is being represented may be the rhythm, irregularity or bodily character of the movement.
In some languages, such expressive resources form a rich and recognizable part of everyday vocabulary.
One of those languages is Siwu, spoken in Ghana.
And the relevant linguistic phenomenon is known as ideophony.
The central question is surprisingly difficult:
What happens when a word does not merely describe a sensory experience but depicts it?
1. Most of us learn that words are labels
A child learns:
table
chair
water
run
soft
cold
We usually explain these words by connecting them to objects, actions or properties.
A table is a kind of object.
Running is a kind of movement.
Softness is a tactile property.
Coldness is a sensation or temperature-related quality.
This produces a familiar model of language:
word → meaning → thing or experience
It works well enough for many purposes.
But it conceals an important fact.
Speech is not only a sequence of abstract symbols.
It is also a physical event.
It has duration.
Rhythm.
Pitch.
Intensity.
Repetition.
Tempo.
Voice quality.
Silence.
And speakers can use these properties to communicate.
Sometimes the form of an utterance does more than identify an experience.
It helps stage that experience.
2. What is an ideophone?
Linguist Mark Dingemanse has described ideophones as marked words that depict sensory imagery.
This definition contains several important components.
First, ideophones are words.
They are not necessarily spontaneous noises invented without linguistic structure.
They can be conventional expressions known and used within a speech community.
Second, they are marked.
They may stand out from surrounding speech through their sound patterns, prosody, grammatical behaviour or performance.
Third, they depict.
Their form participates in evoking the experience being represented.
Fourth, their meanings involve sensory imagery.
And sensory imagery is much broader than sound.
It may concern:
- movement and bodily action;
- visual appearance;
- texture and touch;
- sensations such as coolness;
- rhythm and intensity;
- posture, shape and manner;
- internally experienced physical states.
This is why ideophones cannot simply be reduced to animal noises or comic-book sound effects.
They belong to a much larger expressive territory.
3. Why Siwu?
Siwu is a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana.
It has attracted particular attention in linguistic research because of its rich ideophonic vocabulary and the ways speakers use that vocabulary in interaction.
Dingemanse’s work on Siwu is especially valuable because it examines ideophones not only as isolated dictionary entries but also as elements of actual communication.
The research includes sensory categorization, conversation, narrative, gesture and creative language use.
This gives us something more useful than a collection of exotic-sounding expressions.
It gives us an opportunity to investigate a linguistic mechanism.
How can conventional words function as miniature sensory demonstrations?
4. A word for a cool sensation
One documented Siwu ideophone is:
saaa
It has been described as depicting a cool sensation.
Now compare the English adjective:
cool
The English word identifies a property or experience.
We can say:
The water is cool.
The room feels cool.
The breeze is cool.
The meaning is clear.
But consider the possibility that the sound shape and performance of an expression can participate in presenting the sensation itself.
In an ideophonic expression, the listener is not simply told to retrieve a category such as coolness.
The utterance may offer a perceptual demonstration associated with that category.
This does not mean the word literally lowers the listener’s body temperature.
It means that its expressive form can help evoke a sensory impression.
That distinction is essential.
5. The word does not have to reproduce the sensation physically
A word for coolness is not cold.
A word for roughness is not rough to the touch.
A word for brightness does not emit light.
So how can such words depict sensory experience?
Through iconicity.
Iconicity is a motivated relationship between aspects of a linguistic form and aspects of its meaning.
The relationship need not be a literal physical reproduction.
A sound pattern can evoke rhythm.
Lengthening can evoke duration.
Repetition can evoke recurrence.
Changes in tempo can evoke changes in movement.
Certain formal contrasts can support perceptual analogies.
The important word is analogy.
An ideophone can resemble an aspect of an experience without being physically identical to it.
6. Description and depiction are different operations
Consider an English sentence:
The man moved in an irregular, unstable way.
This describes the movement.
Now imagine an expressive vocal performance that reproduces something of its uneven rhythm.
That performance depicts an aspect of the movement.
The two operations are related, but they are not identical.
Description works primarily by using conventional linguistic meaning to identify or characterize something.
Depiction works by presenting a form that invites the listener to recognize a resemblance to an experience.
In practice, language can combine both.
An ideophone is especially interesting because it can be a conventional word and a depiction at the same time.
That combination challenges the simple opposition between language as arbitrary symbols and gesture as direct demonstration.
7. A documented example: gbadara-gbadara
Dingemanse discusses the Siwu ideophone:
gbadara-gbadara
It depicts a drunkard’s wobbling gait.
Notice what makes this example interesting.
The relevant experience is not merely the fact that somebody is walking.
Nor is it simply the fact that somebody is drunk.
It concerns the particular character of the movement.
The expression offers a vivid way to present that movement as a perceptual event.
An English translation such as:
walking unsteadily
can convey the general meaning.
But it does not automatically reproduce the expressive organization of the Siwu form.
The translation may describe what the ideophone depicts.
That is not necessarily the same communicative act.
8. Why this is not ordinary onomatopoeia
English has familiar expressions such as:
bang
buzz
crash
tick-tock
These are often discussed as onomatopoeia.
They evoke or imitate sounds.
But ideophones can extend well beyond audible events.
A wobbling gait is primarily a visual and kinetic phenomenon.
A cool sensation is tactile or bodily.
A glittering appearance is visual.
A tightly woven surface involves texture and spatial arrangement.
A language can use expressive vocal forms to depict experiences that are not themselves sounds.
That is the crucial expansion.
Speech can depict more than what the world sounds like.
It can depict how the world looks, moves and feels.
9. Another Siwu example: gelegele
The Siwu ideophone:
gelegele
has been described as depicting a glittery appearance.
Consider an English description:
The object was glittering.
This identifies a visual phenomenon.
But an ideophone can present the phenomenon through a distinctive expressive form.
The word becomes part of how the speaker stages the visual impression.
This is particularly striking because the medium is auditory.
A listener hears speech.
Yet the intended imagery is visual.
That is a cross-modal achievement.
The voice is being used to communicate an impression from another sensory domain.
10. Language can cross sensory boundaries
We often imagine the senses as separate channels.
Eyes receive visual information.
Ears receive sound.
Skin provides tactile information.
But communication regularly crosses these boundaries.
We say:
a sharp sound
a warm voice
a bright tone
a rough voice
These English expressions show how sensory vocabulary can extend across modalities.
Ideophones reveal another possibility.
Rather than merely borrowing a descriptive adjective from one sensory domain, the speaker can use expressive sound patterns to evoke the structure of an experience.
The voice becomes a resource for representing movement, appearance or sensation.
The important phenomenon is not that sound magically becomes touch or vision.
It is that humans can recognize meaningful correspondences between patterns in different modalities.
11. The sound of the word is not a universal code
We need an important scientific safeguard here.
It would be tempting to claim:
This particular sound naturally means wobbling to every human being.
Or:
This vowel universally means coolness.
Such claims require evidence.
Ideophones are conventional linguistic forms.
Their meanings are learned within particular languages and communities.
Iconicity can support interpretation, but it does not eliminate convention.
A speaker unfamiliar with Siwu may not correctly identify the meaning of gbadara-gbadara simply by hearing it.
And even when listeners perceive a resemblance, different languages can develop different expressive solutions.
Therefore:
iconicity does not mean universal transparency.
A motivated form is not necessarily a self-translating form.
12. Why repetition matters
Many ideophones contain repeated material.
Consider:
gbadara-gbadara
The repeated structure is immediately visible.
But repetition is not merely decoration.
In expressive language, repetition can contribute to the depiction of recurring movement, duration, intensity or another patterned feature.
However, we must avoid a new oversimplification.
Not every repeated word is an ideophone.
And not every ideophone contains repetition.
Dingemanse’s research on ideophones and reduplication emphasizes precisely this distinction.
Repetition can serve different grammatical and communicative functions.
Its contribution depends on how it is used.
The same formal operation can participate in description or depiction.
13. Repetition does not always mean “more”
Students frequently encounter a simplistic explanation:
Repeat a word to intensify it.
Sometimes that works.
But repetition can also represent:
recurrence;
continuity;
distribution;
iteration;
rhythmic organization;
or a particular manner of movement.
For example, imagine a bouncing object.
A repeated vocal pattern might depict the recurring impacts.
But another repeated pattern might evoke the irregularity or tempo of the movement rather than simply the number of impacts.
The form must be interpreted within the linguistic system and communicative situation.
A mechanical equation such as:
repetition = intensity
is not sufficient.
14. Ideophones are not merely emotional exaggeration
Another misunderstanding is that expressive words are somehow less precise than ordinary vocabulary.
They may be treated as playful additions used when speakers do not know a proper descriptive word.
But the Siwu evidence challenges that assumption.
Research shows that ideophones can encode fine-grained sensory distinctions.
Their meanings may be highly specific.
The difference between two ways of moving, two textures or two visual appearances may matter to speakers.
A conventional ideophone can provide an efficient means of presenting a perceptual quality that would otherwise require a longer description.
Expressiveness and precision are not opposites.
Sometimes expressiveness is precisely what makes a distinction communicatively useful.
15. Sensory vocabulary can have its own organization
In research on Siwu sensory vocabulary, ideophones were investigated through sorting tasks designed to reveal relationships among their meanings.
The findings showed organization around fine-grained perceptual dimensions.
This is important because a rich ideophone system is not simply an unordered collection of colourful expressions.
It can have semantic structure.
Words can cluster according to perceptual similarities.
They can distinguish types of motion, appearance, texture or sensation.
The organization can correspond to dimensions relevant in sensory science.
In other words, ideophones can form part of a systematic sensory lexicon.
They are not necessarily linguistic ornaments attached to a supposedly more serious vocabulary.
16. The difference between naming a sensation and demonstrating it
Consider two speakers describing a surface.
The first says:
It is rough.
The second uses a distinctive expressive form associated with a particular rough texture.
Both may communicate successfully.
But they may do different things.
The first identifies a broad property.
The second may invite the listener to reconstruct a more specific sensory impression.
This does not automatically make the second description better.
Different communicative tasks require different levels and kinds of precision.
Sometimes:
rough
is exactly enough.
Sometimes the listener needs to understand what kind of roughness is involved.
The distinction is not between an inferior language and a superior language.
It is between different communicative resources.
17. Does English have ideophones?
English certainly possesses expressive vocabulary and sound-symbolic resources.
Examples such as:
zigzag
wobble
splash
glimmer
can suggest relationships between form, movement, sound or appearance.
But we should not automatically classify every expressive English word as an ideophone in the same grammatical sense as a Siwu ideophone.
Languages differ in how these expressions are organized.
A category may be highly productive and recognizable in one language while related phenomena are distributed across several lexical or grammatical classes in another.
The useful question is not:
Does English have any expressive words?
It obviously does.
The more interesting question is:
How centrally does a language organize depictive sensory words as a conventional linguistic resource?
18. The same sensory experience can be communicated in different ways
Imagine someone falling.
An English speaker might say:
He fell suddenly.
Another speaker might imitate the sound of impact:
Crash!
Another might produce a gesture showing the trajectory.
Another might use an ideophone that depicts the character of the movement.
These are not interchangeable representations.
They foreground different aspects of the event.
One identifies the action.
Another emphasizes the impact.
Another traces the movement.
Another evokes its sensory character.
This gives us a more complete model of communication:
event → selected aspect → representational mode → utterance
The speaker does not merely choose words.
The speaker chooses how the experience will be presented.
19. A gesture can do something a sentence does not
Suppose I say:
The object moved like this.
And I move my hand in a spiral.
The words alone do not specify the trajectory.
The gesture contributes essential information.
Now imagine a vocal expression whose rhythm or sound shape similarly helps present an aspect of the movement.
The mechanism is not identical to a hand gesture.
But there is a meaningful parallel.
Both can use form to depict a perceptual pattern.
This is one reason ideophones are so important to the study of multimodal communication.
They show that the boundary between speaking and demonstrating is not as sharp as we often imagine.
20. Are ideophones always accompanied by gestures?
No.
And this is one of the most valuable findings from Dingemanse’s research.
It would be easy to imagine that ideophones are always performed with expressive hand movements.
But corpus research on everyday Siwu speech found that ideophone–gesture combinations were less frequent overall than earlier accounts might suggest.
The relationship depended partly on discourse type.
Couplings were more frequent in narrative contexts.
And ideophones showed a particularly strong association with iconic gestures.
This distinction matters.
Ideophones and gestures can work together.
But they do not have to.
The presence of an ideophone does not mechanically require a gesture.
21. Why iconic gestures matter
An iconic gesture depicts an aspect of what is being communicated.
A speaker may trace a shape.
Indicate a trajectory.
Show an object’s size.
Reproduce a movement pattern.
Such gestures have something in common with ideophones.
Both can exploit perceptible resemblance.
But they operate through different physical channels.
The hand moves through visible space.
The voice produces sound through time.
When the two are combined, they can contribute complementary information.
A vocal pattern may depict rhythm.
A hand movement may depict trajectory.
Together they can create a richer representation than either one alone.
22. Speech is not only symbolic
Traditional explanations often present a sharp contrast:
Words are arbitrary symbols.
Pictures and gestures resemble what they represent.
That distinction captures something important, but it is incomplete.
Human language also contains iconic resources.
Sound symbolism.
Ideophones.
Prosodic depiction.
Expressive lengthening.
Rhythmic patterns.
These resources demonstrate that spoken language can combine symbolic convention with perceptual resemblance.
The two principles are not mutually exclusive.
A word can be learned as part of a language and still possess a form that contributes to how its meaning is experienced.
23. A word can be conventional and depictive at the same time
This is perhaps the most important theoretical point.
Suppose an ideophone is recognized by Siwu speakers as a conventional word.
Its meaning is part of the language.
That is its symbolic dimension.
But its distinctive form and performance can also evoke aspects of a sensory experience.
That is its depictive dimension.
The two functions coexist.
This means we should not force the expression into a false choice:
Either it is a word or it is an imitation.
It can be both a conventional lexical item and a depictive act.
That combination is what makes ideophones so revealing.
24. What happens when speakers invent a new ideophone?
Here the Siwu research becomes even more interesting.
Dingemanse investigated the creation of new, unconventionalized ideophones in naturally occurring conversation.
This matters because a purely dictionary-based approach might suggest that ideophones are simply memorized expressive words.
But speakers can also create new depictive forms.
How can listeners understand something they have never heard before?
The answer involves several interacting resources.
Existing conventions of depiction.
Recognizable sound–meaning relationships.
Prosodic foregrounding.
Shared context.
Knowledge of the ongoing conversation.
And the listener’s ability to construct a plausible interpretation.
The speaker is not necessarily producing an arbitrary noise.
They are working within an established communicative practice.
25. Creativity does not mean the absence of rules
Imagine a musician improvising.
The performance may be new.
But the musician is not necessarily acting without structure.
Rhythm, harmony, style and learned patterns shape what can be produced and recognized.
Creative ideophone use offers an analogous linguistic situation.
The speaker may produce a new expression.
But the form is interpreted against a background of familiar expressive conventions.
The listener recognizes that a particular stretch of speech is being offered as a depiction.
This is why creative communication can work without requiring every expression to have a fixed dictionary entry.
The system provides resources for interpreting novelty.
26. Why the listener must recognize the mode
Imagine someone says:
The ball rolled slowly.
You interpret the sentence as a description.
Now imagine the speaker produces an unusually prolonged, rhythmically shaped expression intended to evoke the rolling movement.
The listener needs to recognize that this part of the utterance is not merely ordinary descriptive vocabulary.
It is a depictive performance.
Prosody and context can help signal that shift.
This is one reason ideophones are often described as marked.
Their special form can invite a different interpretive approach.
The listener is not simply decoding a proposition.
They are also interpreting a demonstration.
27. The same sound can be meaningless outside its communicative setting
Suppose someone produces an unfamiliar expressive sound in isolation.
You may not know what it means.
Now place the sound inside a story about a person stumbling down a hill.
Add a gesture.
Add the speaker’s facial expression.
Add a recognizable rhythmic pattern.
Suddenly the interpretation may become much easier.
The acoustic form has not necessarily changed.
The communicative environment has.
This reveals something fundamental about meaning.
Meaning is not always contained entirely within an isolated word.
It can emerge through the relationship between linguistic form, context, shared knowledge and interaction.
28. Why translation becomes difficult
Consider the Siwu ideophone:
gbadara-gbadara
A translator might choose:
wobbling
staggering
walking unsteadily
Each translation captures something useful.
But none automatically reproduces the original expressive effect.
The problem is not simply that English lacks a perfect synonym.
The source expression may perform a depictive function that an ordinary English verb or adverb does not.
The translator must decide what matters most.
The physical movement?
The rhythm?
The vividness?
The speaker’s attitude?
The narrative pace?
The expressive performance?
Different translation solutions may preserve different aspects.
29. Sometimes translation requires changing the mode
A literal word-for-word translation may be insufficient.
The translator may need to use:
a descriptive phrase;
an expressive English word;
repetition;
rhythmic sentence structure;
a different narrative construction;
or an additional contextual detail.
The objective is not necessarily to imitate the original sounds.
That might produce nonsense in the target language.
The deeper objective is to reconstruct the communicative effect as faithfully as the target language and context allow.
This is a general translation principle.
When the source language depicts, a target-language description may preserve the event but lose the performance.
30. How Siwu differs from Maniq
In our earlier investigation of Maniq and the language of smell, we examined how a language can possess a rich lexical system for categorizing olfactory experience.
The central issue was how sensory experiences are divided into recognizable linguistic categories.
Siwu opens a different question.
Not merely:
What sensory distinctions can a language name?
But:
How can the physical form of speech participate in presenting those distinctions?
Maniq helps us examine sensory categorization.
Siwu helps us examine sensory depiction.
These mechanisms are related, but they are not identical.
That distinction is why the two investigations complement each other rather than repeat the same idea.
31. How Siwu differs from Pirahã
Our study of Pirahã and exact number examined symbolic language as a cognitive technology.
A number word can help preserve an exact abstraction after the original objects disappear.
Siwu draws attention to another dimension of linguistic form.
Language does not only compress experience into reusable symbols.
It can also make selected aspects of experience perceptually vivid.
One mechanism helps stabilize an abstraction.
Another helps stage a sensation.
Both remind us that language is more than a system for attaching names to things.
But they operate in fundamentally different ways.
32. Is an ideophone a tiny performance?
In an important sense, yes.
But we should use the metaphor carefully.
An ideophone does not have to be theatrical.
It does not require exaggerated facial expressions or hand gestures.
It may occur naturally within everyday conversation.
The performance lies in the use of speech form to depict an experience.
Sometimes this involves distinctive rhythm.
Sometimes duration.
Sometimes unusual sound patterns.
Sometimes expressive prosody.
The relevant feature is not dramatic acting.
It is the communicative use of linguistic form as a depiction.
33. Why this matters for ordinary communication
Imagine trying to explain how a machine vibrates.
You could say:
It vibrates irregularly.
But perhaps you imitate the rhythm:
brr… brr-brr… brr…
The imitation may immediately communicate something the adjective irregularly leaves unspecified.
Now imagine describing how someone knocked on a door.
He knocked three times.
That gives the number of knocks.
But a rhythmic demonstration might distinguish:
knock — knock — knock
from:
knock-knock … knock
The event category remains the same.
The temporal pattern differs.
This everyday example helps explain the depictive potential of vocal communication.
It is an English illustration, not a claim that these invented sound sequences are documented Siwu ideophones.
34. A teacher can explain a sound — or demonstrate it
The distinction between description and depiction has immediate educational consequences.
Suppose a learner struggles with pronunciation.
A teacher can explain:
This vowel is long.
That is a description.
But the teacher can also produce the vowel with the appropriate duration.
That is a demonstration.
The student receives different kinds of information.
The explanation identifies the relevant property.
The demonstration makes the property perceptible.
Neither automatically replaces the other.
Effective teaching often requires both.
35. Rhythm cannot always be taught through rules alone
Consider stress and intonation.
A textbook may explain:
The stressed syllable is stronger.
But real stress can involve several acoustic cues, including pitch, duration and intensity, with their relative importance varying across languages and contexts.
A learner may understand the explanation intellectually and still produce the wrong rhythm.
Hearing a model can help.
Imitating it can help.
Comparing two contrasting performances can help.
This is another example of why language learning cannot be reduced to memorizing descriptions of linguistic behaviour.
Sometimes the learner needs to experience the contrast directly.
36. Thinking Instead of Memorizing does not exclude imitation
This is an important distinction.
Imitation is sometimes treated as the opposite of understanding.
But imitation can be a way of investigating a mechanism.
Suppose a learner imitates two pronunciations.
At first, the difference may be purely auditory.
Then the learner notices that one vowel is longer.
Or that stress falls on a different syllable.
Or that the intonation changes the speaker’s attitude.
Now imitation has become analysis.
The learner is not merely copying sounds.
They are discovering which features of the performance matter.
This is the difference between mechanical repetition and meaningful practice.
37. Grammar, meaning and performance are not separate worlds
Traditional language education often divides learning into categories:
grammar;
vocabulary;
pronunciation;
listening;
speaking.
Those divisions are administratively convenient.
But actual communication combines them.
A change in prosody can affect interpretation.
A gesture can clarify reference.
A repeated form can contribute to meaning.
A word can be both conventional and depictive.
An ideophone can interact with syntax, narrative structure and gesture.
Siwu makes these interactions especially visible.
It reminds us that language is not assembled from independent textbook compartments.
It is produced as an integrated communicative event.
38. The body is part of speaking
Speech is produced by a body.
It unfolds in time.
It involves coordinated movement.
It can be accompanied by gesture, posture, gaze and facial expression.
These facts do not mean every bodily movement is linguistic.
Nor do they mean every gesture has the same status as a conventional word.
But they do mean that a complete theory of human communication cannot ignore the physical form of utterances.
Ideophones are particularly revealing because they sit at the intersection of conventional language and perceptual demonstration.
They make the expressive possibilities of speech difficult to overlook.
39. Does this mean all language is iconic?
No.
Many linguistic forms are conventional without any transparent resemblance to what they mean.
The English word table does not obviously resemble a table.
Different languages use very different words for the same object.
That conventionality is one of the great strengths of human language.
But it is not the entire story.
Human languages also exploit iconic relationships.
And different languages may give those relationships different degrees of lexical and grammatical prominence.
Siwu demonstrates that iconic depiction can be a substantial part of ordinary linguistic communication.
It does not eliminate the symbolic nature of language.
It expands our understanding of it.
40. What the research actually allows us to conclude
The Siwu evidence supports several important conclusions.
Ideophones can form a rich conventional vocabulary.
Their meanings can concern multiple sensory domains.
They can participate in everyday communication.
Their expressive forms can contribute to depiction.
They can combine with iconic gestures, although not in every occurrence.
Speakers can also create new ideophones using recognizable communicative conventions.
These findings do not prove that Siwu speakers have biologically superior sensory perception.
They do not prove that every ideophone is immediately understandable to outsiders.
They do not mean that English cannot express the same experiences.
And they do not justify describing Siwu as a more emotional, primitive or instinctive language.
The scientific value lies in the linguistic mechanism itself.
A language can develop systematic conventional resources for depicting sensory experience through speech.
That is already a remarkable finding.
41. The word can become part of the experience
Return to our original example.
Someone walks unsteadily.
A description identifies the movement.
An ideophone may evoke aspects of its rhythm or bodily character.
A gesture may trace its trajectory.
A speaker may combine these resources.
The listener reconstructs the event from several interacting forms of information.
What emerges is not simply a proposition.
It is a communicative representation with perceptual qualities.
This is why ideophones are so important for understanding the expressive range of language.
They reveal that speech can do more than tell us what happened.
It can invite us to experience something of how it happened.
Conclusion: language can describe the world — and sometimes perform a piece of it
We began with a simple distinction.
He walked unsteadily.
A clear description.
Then we considered a different possibility.
What if the form of an utterance helps depict the rhythm, movement or sensation being communicated?
Siwu shows that this is not merely an occasional theatrical trick.
Ideophones can form a rich and conventional part of a language.
They can depict visual appearance, bodily sensation, movement and other perceptual experiences.
They can interact with gesture.
They can be used creatively.
And they can organize sensory distinctions with considerable precision.
The larger lesson is not that language abandons meaning and becomes imitation.
It is that meaning can be communicated through more than one representational mode.
Sometimes we describe an experience.
Sometimes we depict an aspect of it.
Sometimes we combine the two.
And the boundary between them is not necessarily the boundary between language and everything outside language.
It can exist inside language itself.
A word does not always stand at a distance from the experience it represents. Sometimes its form becomes part of the way that experience is communicated.
— Tymur Levitin
Further reading and research sources
The Siwu expressions and research findings discussed in this article are drawn from published linguistic studies.
- Mark Dingemanse — Redrawing the Margins of Language: Lessons from Research on Ideophones (2018). A broad theoretical discussion of ideophones, iconicity and sensory depiction.
- Mark Dingemanse — Ideophones and the Aesthetics of Everyday Language in a West-African Society (2011). Research on the expressive and sensory functions of Siwu ideophones.
- Mark Dingemanse — Ideophones and Gesture in Everyday Speech (2013). A corpus-based investigation of ideophones and iconic gestures.
- Mark Dingemanse — Making New Ideophones in Siwu: Creative Depiction in Conversation (2014). An investigation of creative ideophone formation and interpretation.
- Mark Dingemanse — Ideophones and Reduplication: Depiction, Description, and the Interpretation of Repeated Talk in Discourse (2015). A study of how repetition can contribute to different modes of linguistic representation.
About the author and language learning
Tymur Levitin is the founder and director of Levitin Language School, an international online school offering individual language education.
His educational approach emphasizes understanding linguistic mechanisms, recognizing meaning in context and developing the ability to use language in real communication.
This investigation of Siwu forms part of the school’s broader Language as a Way of Thinking research direction.
The purpose of these comparative studies is not to suggest that every language discussed is offered as a course. It is to explore how human languages organize experience and how those discoveries can enrich language learning, translation and communication.
The same principles of meaningful explanation, contextual learning and practical application inform the school’s individual online lessons.
For international learning opportunities, visit Language Learnings.
For professional translation, editing, proofreading and copywriting, see the school’s Professional Language Services.
To enquire about individual online lessons, contact Tymur Levitin directly via Telegram.
Tymur Levitin
Founder & Director, Levitin Language School
Language Teacher, Translator and Author
© Tymur Levitin / Levitin Language School. All rights reserved.
