Ideophones in Swahili: a preliminary survey

Ideophones in African languages were first noticed by Harry Thurston Peck (1856–1914) in 1886. He apparently had access to some dictionaries of West African languages in the 1880’s and could not resist the temptation to work on them. The results were published in The American Journal of Philology in 1886. Later, Doke (1935: 118), identified them as ideophones and defined them as: “A vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, colour, sound, smell, action, state or intensity.” Linguists were soon fascinated by ideophones and in overemphasising the extent of their distinctiveness, and tried to categorise them as a category apart. As demonstrated by Mahmoud Adam in his paper A Brief Analysis of Dagbani ideophones, where Hausa ideophones have been loaned to Dagbani, in some cases intact, and with little modifications in others. Because of their expressiveness, ideophones are of utmost importance in African languages if we consider the fact that most of them are still based on the oral tradition. They are very useful for “dramatic and sensational purposes in the oral arts like music, storytelling, poetry, and in its rich griot tradition” (Adam 2011: 24).