Beneath the orderly grammar you have spent levels mastering, Afrikaans keeps a playful, sound-driven layer of vocabulary where the ordinary rules loosen. These are the expressive words — onomatopoeia that imitates a noise (kraak, plof, tjirp), ideophones that paint a whole scene of sound, manner, or movement in a single vivid form, and reduplications that intensify by repetition. What unites them is sound symbolism: the principle that the shape of the word — its consonants, its rhythm — is felt to resemble what it means, rather than being an arbitrary label. This is a C2 topic not because it is hard to use but because appreciating it is the mark of someone who has stopped translating and started feeling the language. It is also, as we will see, one of the places where the special history of Afrikaans at the Cape may have left its mark.
What sound symbolism means
For most words, the link between sound and meaning is arbitrary: nothing about tafel resembles a table. Sound-symbolic words break that arbitrariness — the form is iconic, chosen because it evokes the thing. English has this too (splash, zigzag, flutter), but it sits at the edges of the lexicon. Afrikaans uses the device freely and unselfconsciously, and the result is a register that feels concrete and alive.
Die droë takke het onder ons voete gekraak.
The dry branches cracked under our feet.
Die sak meel het met 'n plof op die vloer geval.
The bag of flour fell to the floor with a thud.
Notice that kraak and plof function as perfectly normal verbs and nouns — sound symbolism is a property of the word's origin and feel, not a separate grammar. You conjugate kraak like any verb (het gekraak).
Onomatopoeia: words that copy a sound
The most transparent layer is klanknabootsing (literally "sound-imitation") — onomatopoeia. Animal noises, impacts, and natural sounds all have conventionalised Afrikaans forms, and learning them is a quick way to sound native, because they differ from their English counterparts in instructive ways.
| Afrikaans | Sound | English equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| woef | a dog barking | woof |
| miaau | a cat | meow |
| kukeleku | a rooster | cock-a-doodle-doo |
| tjirp | a cricket / small bird | chirp |
| tik-tak | a clock | tick-tock |
| kraak | a creak / crack | creak, crack |
| plof | a soft thud | thud, plop |
Die hond het hard geblaf: woef-woef!
The dog barked loudly: woof-woof!
Iewers in die gras het 'n krieket aanhoudend getjirp.
Somewhere in the grass a cricket chirped continuously.
A delightful, very South African example is the bird names built straight from their calls: the bokmakierie and the dove called piet-my-vrou are named by imitating what they sing. This naming-by-sound is a window onto how naturally the language leans on iconicity.
Ideophones: a whole scene in one word
Beyond simple noise-copying lies the ideophone — a richer category, well documented across southern African languages, that depicts not just a sound but a manner, a texture, or a movement in one vivid, often reduplicated form. Where onomatopoeia copies a noise, an ideophone evokes a sensory gestalt: how something glints, scuttles, plops, or trembles. Linguists describe ideophones as "depictive" rather than "descriptive" — they perform the meaning rather than label it.
Die kewer het tok-tok teen die hout geklop.
The beetle tapped tok-tok against the wood.
The little beetle called the tok-tokkie takes its very name from this — the tok-tok of it knocking on the ground. Ideophones characteristically resist normal inflection: they often appear as fixed exclamatory forms, frequently introduced by a verb of saying or doing, and they do not readily take tense, plural, or comparative endings the way ordinary words do.
| Expressive form | Evokes | Note |
|---|---|---|
| tok-tok | a small, hard knocking | source of tok-tokkie (beetle) |
| tjok-tjok | a chugging, rhythmic motion | e.g. an old train |
| kits-kits | quick, instant repetition | from kits, "instant" |
| sus-sus | hushing, soothing | quieting a baby |
Sy het die baba saggies sus-sus aan die slaap gewieg.
She rocked the baby softly, hush-hush, to sleep.
Expressive reduplication
A favourite mechanism is reduplication — repeating a form to add liveliness, repetition, or smallness. The general grammar of reduplication (nou-nou, ver-ver, plek-plek) has its own reduplication page; here the point is its expressive use, where the doubling itself carries the iconicity — the repetition of the syllable mimics the repetition of the action or sound.
Die kindertjies het twee-twee in 'n ry gestaan.
The little children stood in a row, two by two.
Hier en daar, plek-plek, het die verf begin afdop.
Here and there, in spots, the paint had begun to peel.
The doubling in plek-plek ("in spots, here and there") does iconic work: the scattered repetition of the word mirrors the scattered patches it describes. This is expressive reduplication at its clearest — form echoing meaning.
Words that feel iconic: frommel, kreukel
A subtler, more debatable case is ordinary vocabulary that many speakers feel to be sound-symbolic even though it is not strictly onomatopoeic. Frommel (to crumple/rumple) and kreukel (to crease/wrinkle) are good examples: the clustered consonants and the -mmel/-kel endings give a crinkly, crumply feel that seems to match the action of crushing soft material. Whether this feeling reflects a genuine sound–meaning link or is read into words of independent (largely Dutch) origin is genuinely uncertain — sound symbolism of this "phonaesthetic" kind is real but hard to prove for any single word. We flag it as suggestive rather than established.
Moenie die brief so frommel nie — sit dit netjies in die koevert.
Don't crumple the letter like that — put it neatly in the envelope.
Sy het haar voorkop gekreukel toe sy die rekening sien.
She wrinkled her forehead when she saw the bill.
A contact-shaped vividness — with due caution
Here is the distinguishing observation, and it deserves both enthusiasm and honesty. Afrikaans has an expressive, ideophonic layer that is unusually rich for a Germanic language, and a body of scholarship attributes part of that vividness to language contact at the Cape — in particular to the Khoekhoe (Khoi) languages, which, like many southern African languages, have elaborate ideophone systems. Some specific ideophones and a portion of the expressive lexicon are argued to be Khoekhoe-influenced or Khoekhoe-sourced.
This should be stated carefully. The broad claim — that Afrikaans's expressive layer is richer and more iconic than, say, Dutch's, and that the southern African contact setting plausibly contributed — is reasonable and well supported in the literature. The specific claims — exactly which words came from where, and how much of the system is contact-driven versus inherited or independently developed — remain debated among historical linguists. For the documented contact history, see contact influences.
Common mistakes
These are conceptual errors rather than grammatical ones — the wrong attitude toward expressive words.
❌ Ideophones soos tok-tok is nie 'standaard' Afrikaans nie.
Incorrect mindset — ideophones are a normal, fully standard part of the language, not slang to avoid.
✅ Ideophones soos tok-tok is 'n egte deel van Afrikaans.
Ideophones like tok-tok are a genuine part of Afrikaans.
❌ Die deur het gekraaks.
Incorrect — kraak is an ordinary verb; the present is invariant: kraak, perfect het gekraak.
✅ Die deur het gekraak.
The door creaked.
❌ Sy het die baba sus-suste.
Incorrect — ideophones don't take tense endings; use a real verb: sy het sus-sus gemaak / gewieg.
✅ Sy het die baba sus-sus aan die slaap gewieg.
She rocked the baby hush-hush to sleep.
❌ Frommel kom beslis van 'n nabootsende klank af.
Overconfident — the sound-symbolic feel of frommel is suggestive, not proven; don't assert a firm etymology.
✅ Frommel vóél klanksimbolies, al is die herkoms onseker.
Frommel feels sound-symbolic, even if its origin is uncertain.
Key takeaways
- Sound symbolism is iconicity — the word's shape evokes its meaning. Afrikaans uses it freely, giving the language a concrete, vivid feel.
- Onomatopoeia (woef, tjirp, kraak, plof) copies a sound and behaves like ordinary vocabulary — you conjugate kraak normally (het gekraak).
- Ideophones (tok-tok, sus-sus) depict sound, manner, or movement in one vivid form and resist inflection — no tense, plural, or -e; they often follow a verb of saying/doing.
- Expressive reduplication (plek-plek, twee-twee) lets the doubling itself carry iconic meaning; see reduplication for the general grammar.
- Words like frommel and kreukel feel iconic, but such phonaesthetic links are suggestive, not provable — flag them honestly.
- Afrikaans's expressive layer is unusually rich for a Germanic language, and Cape language contact (notably Khoekhoe) is a credible contributor — keep the general insight, but treat word-by-word etymologies as debated; see contact influences.
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Start learning Afrikaans→Related Topics
- Reduplication: loop-loop, plek-plekB1 — Doubling a word — loop-loop, plek-plek, kort-kort — to express aspect, distribution and intensity; a productive Afrikaans device that English needs whole adverbs for.
- Contact Influences: Khoekhoe, Malay, PortugueseC1 — The non-Dutch layers in Afrikaans — Khoekhoe, Malay, Portuguese, Bantu and English — and the case that the language's most distinctive features came from contact, not from Dutch alone.
- Exclamations and Interjections: OverviewA2 — Afrikaans has a rich, culturally specific set of interjections — ag, sjoe, foei, eina, jislaaik — that express emotion in a single invariant word and instantly mark a fluent speaker.
- Word Formation: OverviewA2 — Afrikaans builds new words with a small but powerful toolkit — a pervasive diminutive, solid compounding, prefixes and suffixes, and a distinctive reduplication that English handles with separate words.