In this talk I look at the language of perception through the prism of ideophones in Siwu, an underdescribed Kwa language spoken in Ghana’s mountainous Volta Region. Data from a range of elicitation tasks will be coupled with an analysis of speech during joint activities (e.g. making gunpowder, producing palm oil) to show that ideophones are a key expressive resource in talking about perception and sensation in Siwu.

In the first part of the talk I will discuss data from a range of perceptual stimuli designed to study the comparative codability of different sensory experiences. Some domains (e.g. touch, taste) are almost exclusively covered by ideophonic vocabulary, while in others (e.g. colour, shape) ideophones are supplemented by a range of other linguistic structures.

The second part focuses on the ubiquity of ideophones across a wide variety of speech genres, which reflects a concern of Siwu speakers with their perceptions. A video recording of conversations during the making of gunpowder shows that the collaborators calibrate their understanding of processes and technologies not with cold technical terms, but with vivid sensory language. Ideophones evoking visual and tactile perceptions abound in this environment. A contrastive analysis of the use of ideophones in both natural discourse and elicitation tasks throws light on the interplay of language, culture and the perceptual world in Mawu society.