What is Sound Symbolism?
A traditional core tenet of linguistics is arbitrariness, or the assumption that the semantic content and the phonetic expression of a word are unrelated: there is nothing dog-like about the word dog.
Sound symbolism is the idea that there is in fact a direct relationship between semantic content and phonetic expression.
Sapir found that when asked to select a word to describe large objects, study participants were more likely to use the nonce word mal compared to the nonce word mil.
Sapir suggested this may be due to the volume inherent to certain sounds, or to a subconscious understanding of the fact that the shape of the mouth required to produce /æ/ is larger than that required to produce /ɪ/.
The association of specific sounds with the physical size of a referent is sometimes known as magnitude symbolism.
While it is certainly possible to trace discussion of sound symbolism back to
Cratylus and Plato, modern discussion of sound symbolism usually relies more on the
foundations of Edward Sapir and John Rupert Firth.
Firth coined the word phonestheme, referring to word-initial and word-final groups of sounds that have compositional meaning, asserting that words in English beginning with sl- have a pejorative association (e.g. slack, sluggard, slovenly).
These patterns of sounds appear more frequently than accounted for by chance. Examples include gl-, observed in many words related to light phenomena, such as gleam, glitter, or glow.
Why is Sound Symbolism Important?
Sound symbolism is productive. Researchers have shown that people make use of sound symbolism subconsciously when naming something. In fact, a team of linguists from the University of Southern California, UC Merced and UC Berkeley have even proven that Pokémon names make use of sound symbolism!
Sound symbolism might make it easier to learn new words and languages. In English, participants shown unfamiliar obsolete English words have been shown to be more likely to display partial or full knowledge of the meaning of words that contain a phonestheme compared to words that do not. Japanese researchers have demonstrated that children learning Japanese learn sound symbolic words faster and are able to generalize their usage more readily than non-sound symbolic words. The same researchers suggests this might be true for other languages, too.
Some researchers think that sound symbolism may have played a crucial role in the development of language. The Bootstrapping hypothesis suggests that young children are naturally sensitive to sound symbolism, which helps them connect sounds with meaning – this might be evidence that the evolution of language by early humans occurred be relying on this same sensitivity.
Why am I Interested in Sound Symbolism?
As a speaker of multiple languages and coming from a multilingual family, I have always been fascinated in the processes of language acquisition. I have been involved in language education as both a learner and a teacher, and have seen how different approaches can facilitate or impede learning — sound symbolism is an exciting avenue to explore in this respect!
Since 2014, I have also worked as a translator. Translation requires attention and thought about not only the language itself, but the culture and society of the people who speak both the source and target languages of a translation. One of the languages I work in is Japanese. Japanese has a dedicated class of sound-symbolic adjectives! Translating these terms is both a pleasure and a challenge. Inevitably something is always lost in the translation process, but the research of myself and others has shown that sound symbolism may in fact be accessible across linguistic barriers. Doesn’t that seem like an interesting opportunity for translation?