The Ideophone in Siswati

Authors

  • Muzi Matfunjwa

    South African Centre for Digital Language Resources, North-West University, Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa
  • Khulisile Judith Nkuna

    Department of African Languages, University of Venda, Thohoyandou 0950, South Africa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i7.9533
Received: 16April 2025 | Revised: 13 May 2025 | Accepted: 10 June 2025 | Published Online: 23 July 2025

Abstract

South Africa is a multilingual country wherein 12 languages are official, including Siswati. As in other Bantu languages, the ideophone is a unique part of speech in Siswati that is predominantly used by language users in daily conversations for various communicative purposes. Despite the wide use of the Siswati ideophones, few scholars have investigated them in depth from different perspectives. Therefore, this article describes the features of the ideophone in Siswati from phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic perspectives. The investigators used convenience sampling as a method of collecting data. This data was obtained mainly from various Siswati literary works, which are a true representation of the language usage, supplemented by native speakers’ intuition. The prototype theory and the systematic functional linguistics approach mainly underpin this study. The gathered corpora were systematically explored to determine the phonological features of ideophones, their use in sentence construction, and the meanings they convey in various contexts. The ideophones were classified based on their syllables and formation, as well as their semantic functions.This study is significant as it brings useful insights into the nature of ideophones in Siswati and contributes to the existing body of knowledge in the language. The results show that even though formal speech lacks ideophones, this part of speech is frequently used in normal day-to-day conversations in Siswati to fulfil various linguistic needs.

Keywords:

Ideophone; Siswati; Prototype theory; Systematic functional linguistics

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How to Cite

Matfunjwa, M., & Nkuna, K. J. (2025). The Ideophone in Siswati. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 7(7), 1096–1108. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i7.9533

Issue

Vol. 7 , Iss. 7 (July 2025)

Article Type

Article

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Copyright © 2025 Muzi Matfunjwa, Khulisile Judith Nkuna

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This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.