The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe (‘Mawu mountain’) and Àwubeame (‘in the Mawu mountains’). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi (historical settlements). This post is a synthesis of information from historical maps, scientific literature, oral traditions, and my own trips with Mawu community members.
New paper! McLean & Dingemanse 2025, A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones. In which we review a diversity of methods and analytical approaches to the documentation of ideophones.
This is a the second part in a two part series of peer commentary on a recent preprint.
Every once in a while I come across work that conflates iconicity and indexicality, or lumps them together under a…
Very happy to see this paper out! We combine comparative, lexical, historical, and psycholinguistic evidence for an in-depth look at a pervasive form of cross-modal iconicity.
With the tenth World Congress of African Linguistics around the corner (June 7-12, 2021), let me draw your attention to…
News just reached me that we have lost a dear colleague and one of the people responsible for introducing the…
I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short obituary notes that he was “known for his work on the language of religion and on two Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya”. In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings.
Just out in Glossa, the premier open access journal of general linguistics: Dingemanse, Mark. 2018. “Redrawing the Margins of Language:…
In late 2011, I defended my PhD thesis and submitted two papers on ideophones. One to Language and Linguistics Compass,…
Two duck-related ideophones exist in varieties of Ewe, spoken in Eastern Ghana: a simple kpakpa imitating the sound; and a form dabodabo that…
Organisers Dr. Mark Dingemanse (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) Prof. Sharon Rose (University of California, San Diego) African ideophones and their contribution to…
Instead of probing the cultural or historical context for musical utterances, or the complex networks of social interaction that give…
In Kawu on the very final day of my 2012 fieldtrip, I heard something unusual. Some people talked about a…
Slides for a plenary address delivered at the 2011 African Studies Day, organised by the Netherlands Association of African Studies.…
Note to readers: Portions of this post have been revised and published in the following paper: Dingemanse, Mark. 2019. “Ideophone”…
The first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu was written by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887. The account was originally written in Twi, and translated in German in 1889 by the eminent linguist J.G. Christaller, who published it in a German geographical journal. This post provides an English translation.
Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf’s (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo: This work falls…
On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users’ sensitive feeling…
When I finished my MA thesis back in 2006 I made it available online as a gesture to the Yoruba…



