Japanese sound symbolism

The Japanese language has a large inventory of sound symbolic or mimetic words, known in linguistics as ideophones.

For example, the nasal sound [n] gives a more personal and speaker-oriented impression than the velars [k] and [ɡ]; this contrast can be easily noticed in pairs of synonyms such as node (ので) and kara (から) which both mean because, but with the first being perceived as more subjective.

Similarly, i-type adjectives that contain the fricative [ɕ] in the group shi tend to represent human emotive states, such as in the words kanashii (悲しい, "sad"), sabishii (寂しい, "lonely"), ureshii (嬉しい, "happy"), and tanoshii (楽しい, "enjoyable").

This too is correlated with those phenomimes and psychomimes containing the same fricative sound, for example shitoshito to furu (しとしとと降る, "to rain / snow quietly") and shun to suru (しゅんとする, "to be dispirited").

The use of the gemination can create a more emphatic or emotive version of a word, as in the following pairs of words: pitari / pittari (ぴたり / ぴったり, "tightly"), yahari / yappari (やはり / やっぱり, "as expected"), hanashi / ppanashi (放し / っ放し, "leaving, having left [something] in a particular state"), and many others.