Did onomatopoeia shape the evolution of language?

How has our spoken language developed? (Image: peterschreiber.media/iStock)

If we do not speak a language, we are known to speak with hands and feet – we also sometimes use onomatopoeia: for example, the term “water” can be conveyed through a bubbling sound. Such iconic vocalizations could also have played an important role in the development of human language in addition to gestures, researchers report. This is indicated by tests of comprehension of onomatopoeia in various linguistic cultures around the world. According to the researchers, people can recognize living beings, objects, actions or properties surprisingly well in the utterances of sounds.

How did the first forms of language emerge in the history of human development? In linguistics, it has so far been assumed that our ancestors first communicated with the help of iconic gestures. Actually, this system would be sufficient for complex communication, as the capabilities of today’s sign languages ​​make clear. But obviously a way of communicating through audible language developed primarily in humans. How and why this came about remains unclear. The onomatopoeic aspects of language have so far been given little importance, because the potential for the possible transmission of information was considered to be rather low. To what extent this is actually the case has now been explored by a German-British team of linguists through an experimental study.

What can onomatopoeia achieve?

For their tests, the researchers used recordings of onomatopoeic vocalizations that predominantly invented English speakers for 30 words. They were asked to use their mouths and voices to create auditory impressions that they believed others could associate with the word in question. These included verbs such as “cut” or “sleep”, nouns such as “child” or “fruit” and terms such as “good” or “bad”. In the case of “sleeping”, for example, a snoring sound was an onomatopoeic symbol – with other terms, however, more creativity was required: for “fruit”, some test subjects made a “crunching, slurping” sound. With the abstract word “good”, on the other hand, a noise was typical that changed in pitch from low to high – with “bad” the opposite.

A total of 843 volunteers from 25 different language groups around the world were deployed as interpreting test subjects. Among them were Europeans and Asians as well as people from cultures without written language such as the Palikúr, who live in the Amazon forest, and speakers of the Daakie on the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. During the tests, the subjects heard an onomatopoeic vocalization and were then asked to assign it to a meaning from a selection of possibilities. If you had guessed at random, you would have been correct with a 17 percent chance, the researchers explain.

But the evaluations showed that, on average, the participants were correct in all languages ​​65 percent of the time. Regardless of the cultural background, the study participants recorded the intended meanings of the onomatopoeia with an accuracy that is far beyond mere chance, the researchers sum up.
As you can well imagine, however, there was considerable variation – some vocalizations were easier to interpret than others. The participants almost always guessed the sound for “sleeping” to be correct. In addition, the meanings “eat”, “child”, “tiger” and “water” were able to recognize each other particularly well, but the worst they could do was the onomatopoeia for the meanings “that”, “collect”, “blunt”, “sharp” and assign “knife”.

Possible factor in language development

Overall, however, the recognition rates of onomatopoeic vocalizations were always higher than the random value, report the linguists. “Our results challenge the often-cited notion that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, and show that in the absence of words, people can use onomatopoeic expressions to communicate a variety of meanings,” says co-author Bodo Winter from the University of Birmingham.

First author Aleksandra Ćwiek from the Leibniz Center for General Linguistics in Berlin continues: “It was previously assumed that visible gestures provided the essential building blocks for the development of human language. However, our study now shows that language can also have arisen from onomatopoeia, ”says the linguist. But it is possible that parallel processes were also at work: Iconic gestures probably also played a decisive role in the evolution of human communication, as is the case with the modern emergence of sign languages. Our spoken language today is multimodal, so it can have arisen from audible onomatopoeia and visible gestures, the researchers concluded.

Examples of onomatopoeic vocalizations used in the study for the tests:

to cut

water

Well

Source: University of Birmingham, Article: Scientific Reports, doi: 10.1038 / s41598-021-89445-4

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