A Comparative Study of Ideophones in Dagbani and Gurenԑ

Abstract

Ideophones have been analysed in the linguistic literature as a class of words that depict sensory imagery; they are established in most natural languages, but particularly in African and Asian languages. They have gained popularity for their uniqueness in linguistic forms, including their peculiar phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic behaviour and rich sensory meanings. The question as to whether or not ideophones constitute a separate word class has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. This paper examines the linguistic characteristics of ideophones in Dagbani and Gurenԑ, two Mabia (Gur) Niger-Congo languages spoken in the Northern and Upper East Regions of Ghana, respectively. We demonstrate that ideophones in these languages exhibit peculiar phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic characteristics. Based on these peculiar characteristics, we assume that ideophones constitute a distinct word class in these languages. Ideophones in Dagbani and Gurenԑ have not received any systematic linguistic investigation. This study is therefore significant since it sheds new light on an area that has not received linguistic attention in the two languages under study.