Onomatopoeia is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias in English include animal noises such as oink, meow, roar, and chirp. Onomatopoeia can differ by language: it conforms to some extent to the broader linguistic system. Hence, the sound of a clock may be expressed variously across languages: as tick tock in English, tic tac in Spanish and Italian, see photo, dī dā in Mandarin, kachi kachi in Japanese, or ṭik-ṭik in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali.
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.
In functional-cognitive linguistics, as well as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness. The principle of iconicity is also shared by the approach of linguistic typology.
In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or the stem of a word, or even the whole word, is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
In linguistics, sound symbolism is the perceptual similarity between speech sounds and concept meanings. It is a form of linguistic iconicity. For example, the English word ding may sound similar to the actual sound of a bell.
KhweKWAY is a dialect continuum of the Khoe branch of the Khoe-Kwadi family of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, South Africa, and parts of Zambia, with some 8,000 speakers.
The Japanese language has a large inventory of sound symbolic or mimetic words, known in linguistics as ideophones. Such words are found in written as well as spoken Japanese. Known popularly as onomatopoeia, these words do not just imitate sounds but also cover a much wider range of meanings; indeed, many sound-symbolic words in Japanese are for things that make no noise originally, most clearly demonstrated by 'silently', not to be confused with the religion Shintō.
Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with phonetically and semantically similar words or roots from the adopting language. Thus the approximate sound and meaning of the original expression in the source language are preserved, though the new expression in the target language may sound native.
A phonestheme is a pattern of sounds systematically paired with a certain meaning in a language. The concept was proposed in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth, who coined the term from the Greek φωνή phone, "sound", and αἴσθημα aisthema, "perception". For example, sequence "sl-" appears in English words denoting low-friction motion, like "slide", "slick" and "sled".
Goemai is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in the Great Muri Plains region of Plateau State in central Nigeria, between the Jos Plateau and Benue River. Goemai is also the name of the ethnic group of speakers of the Goemai language. The name 'Ankwe' has been used to refer to the people, especially in older literature and to outsiders. As of 2020, it is estimated that there are around 380,000 Goemai speakers.
In linguistics, apophony is an alternation of vowel (quality) within a word that indicates grammatical information.
Eastern Pomo, also known as Clear Lake Pomo, is a nearly extinct Pomoan language spoken around Clear Lake in Lake County, California by one of the Pomo peoples.
Wolaitta or Wolayttatto Doonaa is a North Omotic language of the Ometo group spoken in the Wolayita Zone and some other parts of southwestern Ethiopia. It is the native language of the Welayta people. The estimates of the population vary greatly because it is not agreed where the boundaries of the language are.
Reduplication in Russian is used to intensify meaning in different ways.
This article provides a grammar sketch of the Nawat or Pipil language, an endangered language spoken by the Pipils of western El Salvador and Nicarao people of Nicaragua. It belongs to the Nahua group within the Uto-Aztecan language family. There also exists a brief typological overview of the language that summarizes the language's most salient features of general typological interest in more technical terms.
Araki is a nearly extinct language spoken in the small island of Araki, south of Espiritu Santo Island in Vanuatu. Araki is gradually being replaced by Tangoa, a language from a neighbouring island.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called declension.
Wago are native Japanese words, meaning those words in Japanese that have been inherited from Old Japanese, rather than being borrowed at some stage. Together with kango (漢語) and gairaigo (外来語), they form one of the three main sources of Japanese words. They are also known as yamato kotoba.
Avá-Canoeiro, known as Avá or Canoe, is a minor Tupi–Guaraní language of the state of Goiás, in Brazil. It can be further divided into two dialects: Tocantins Avá-Canoeiro and Araguaia Avá-Canoeiro. All speakers of the language are monolingual.
Janis Nuckolls is an American anthropological linguist and professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She has spent many years doing field research, with a primary focus on the Amazonian Quichua (Kichwa) people in Ecuador and their endangered language.
