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Linguistics

Sound and meaning in the world's languages

Nature volume 539, pages 39–40 (2016)Cite this article

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The sounds of words that represent particular meanings are usually thought to vary arbitrarily across languages. However, a large-scale study of languages finds that some associations between sound and meaning are widespread.

Plato's dialogue Cratylus begins with a debate. Socrates is asked whether the sounds of words are simply arbitrary conventions, as Hermogenes suggests, or if sounds are reflective in some way of their meaning, as Cratylus proposes. Socrates argues for the latter option, holding that although many words have arbitrary relations to their meanings, 'good' words are distinguished by a correspondence between sense and sound — their sound somehow suits their meaning. However, most researchers today accept the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's updated version1 of Hermogenes' viewpoint that the connection between sound and meaning in language is essentially arbitrary, with a few minor exceptions.

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Figure 1: The bouba–kiki phenomenon.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. W. Tecumseh Fitch is in the Department of Cognitive Biology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, Vienna 1020, Austria.,

    W. Tecumseh Fitch

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  1. W. Tecumseh Fitch
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Correspondence to W. Tecumseh Fitch.

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Fitch, W. Sound and meaning in the world's languages. Nature 539, 39–40 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature20474

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