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Hearing is important for humans to understand the world around them and it lies in our nature to want to describe what we hear. To do this, we frequently make use of onomatopoeias. But what exactly is an onomatopoeia? It is 'the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named'. This blog post offers a cross-linguistic peek at onomatopoeia.

Almost every language on the planet includes words that sound like the things they describe. Crash, yawn, glug… speech is just full of these onomatopoeias. And because they have their root in real things they're often easy to identify. Even a non-native speaker might recognise the Hindi "achhee" (a sneeze) or the Indonesian "gluk" (glug). Because these onomatopoeias are so widely encountered, easy to pick up, and convey information might they be the first form of language? That's the argument presented in a recent paper published in Animal Cognition. It points out that our ancestors would have begun encountering more and more noises that we could repeat. Tool use/ manufacture in particular, with its smashes and crashes, would be a prime source of onomatopoeias. Mimicking these sounds could have allowed early humans to "talk" about the objects; describing goals, methods, and objects. Might handing someone a rock and going "smash" been a way to ask them to make a tool? Perhaps different noises could even refer to different tools. Humans are good at extracting information from mimicked sounds. These sounds also trigger "mirror neurons" - parts of the brain that fire when we observe other people doing something - allowing us to repeat those actions. Seeing someone hold a rock a certain way and saying "smash" could have helped our ancestors teach the proper way to smash. But the biggest benefit would be the fact that you can communicate about these objects without seeing them. Having a sound for a tool would allow you to ask someone for it, even if they didn't have it on them. Given these advantages, it's easy to imagine how evolution would have favoured people who mimicked noises. Over time, this would have driven the development of more and more complex communication; until language as we recognise it emerged. Following this narrative, you can see (or maybe hear) how an a human ancestor with almost no language capability gradual

Words formed from a sound and intended to imitate that sound-what linguists refer to as onomatopoeia-fluctuate around the world even when the underlying sound is roughly the same in each place. And the thing about it is, we don't really understand why this fluctuation occurs. It has something to do with the alchemy of humans in different times and places striving to mimic noises in the world around them, and to incorporate this mimicry into distinct linguistic systems and cultural contexts. Some have hypothesized over the years that language originated with the imitation of natural sounds-a notion sometimes referred to as the "bow-wow theory." But whatever the answer to this question, onomatopoeia explains only a sliver of the words we use. The article goes on to share some fun collections of onomatopoeia.

It's commonly said that the Japanese language wields more food-describing onomatopoeia than any other. These adjectives capture the perceived sounds different foods make when we eat them. Saku saku! Fuwa fuwa! According to estimates, there are 445 such words in the Japanese language. "English has only slightly more than 130 words to describe the way foods feel in our mouths," reports Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science's exploration of food texture in its latest issue themed around taste.

Japanese onomatopoeia is one of the language's most intriguing features. This article categorizes onomatopoetic words by sounds and states, animal noises, bewildering flexibility (e.g., "goro goro" can refer to the sound of thunder or a couch potato lazing around the house), and pain.

Dr. Mitsuhiko Ota, a linguist in the University of Edinburgh Language Sciences department, was the lead researcher in a 2018 study (Ota, Davies-Jenkins, and Skarabela 2018) examining infant-directed speech, a.k.a. baby talk. Across languages, lexical items specific to infant-directed speech (i.e., 'baby-talk words') are characterized by three major features: 1. onomatopoeia incorporated into non-arbitrary, "highly iconic" words, e.g. "quack", "bow wow" 2. diminutives, e.g. "daddy", "tummy" 3. reduplication, e.g. "din din", "easy peasy" These three lexical characteristics may help infants discover the referential nature of words, identify word referents, and segment fluent speech into words. If so, the amount of lexical input containing these properties should predict infants' rate of vocabulary growth. To test this prediction, Ota's team tracked the vocabulary size in 47 English-learning infants from 9 to 21 months and examined whether vocabulary growth was related to measures of iconicity, diminutives, and reduplication in the lexical input at 9 months. The team's analyses showed that both diminutives and reduplication in the input were associated with vocabulary growth, although measures of iconicity were not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonological properties typical of lexical input in infant-directed speech play a role in early vocabulary growth.

"bzzzpeek is presenting a collection of 'onomatopoeia' from around the world using sound recordings from native speakers imitating the sounds of mainly animals and vehicles"

Critter Challenge: How Many Animal Sounds Can You Make in Chinese? Do you know how to say "woof" in Chinese? Learn how to bark, squeak, meow, roar and hee-haw instead! This page provides the word for 22 kinds of animals, along with the particular sounds they make. Each item first lists the animal sound in Chinese, followed by the English name of the animal who makes that sound.

Animal sounds in Japanese are known as 動物の声 (どうぶつのこえ - dōbutsu no koe) - literally "animals' voices." Animal sounds in Japanese are usually one sound that is repeated twice, but are sometimes only said once. Sometimes there are multiple ways to say one animal sound. Check out this page for a listing: has hiragana+the transliteration of the sound in English.

a spate of recent studies challenge this idea. They suggest that we seem instinctively to link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions. Some words really do evoke Humpty's "handsome" rotundity. Others might bring to mind a spiky appearance, a bitter taste, or a sense of swift movement. And when you know where to look, these patterns crop up surprisingly often, allowing a monoglot English speaker to understand more Swahili or Japanese than you might imagine (see "Which sounds bigger?" at the bottom of this article). These cross-sensory connections may even open a window onto the first words ever uttered by our ancestors, giving us a glimpse of the earliest language and how it emerged.

Achoo! Atchoum! Hatschi! Etcì! Why does the same body reaction--a sneeze--produce different sounds all over Europe? Different European languages use a different onomatopeia to transcribe into words the simple act of sneezing. And the proper social responses to sneezing in the various countries mean different things and encode varied cultural beliefs about the act.