Ideophone

The class of ideophones is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically; it occurs mostly in African, Australian, and Amerindian languages, and sporadically elsewhere.

Ideophones resemble interjections but are unclassifiable as such owing to their special phonetic or derivational characteristics, and based on their syntactic function within the sentence.

[2] Dictionaries of languages like Japanese, Korean, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu list thousands of ideophones.

[4] The word ideophone was coined in 1935 by Clement Martyn Doke, who defined it in his Bantu Linguistic Terminology as follows.

A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, color, sound, smell, action, state or intensity.Ideophones evoke sensory events.

[7] Reduplication figures quite prominently in ideophones, often conveying a sense of repetition or plurality present in the evoked event.

[9] However, the form of ideophones does not completely relate to their meaning; as conventionalized words, they contain arbitrary, language-specific phonemes just like other parts of the vocabulary.

In general, however, ideophones tend to occur more extensively in spoken language because of their expressive or dramaturgic function.

[citation needed] The Tamil language uses many ideophones, both in spoken (colloquial) and in formal usage.

In Xhosa, as in closely related Zulu, ideophones can convey very complex experiential impressions or can just strengthen meanings of other words.