Ideophones are attested in all languages of the world, however, languages differ in the extent to which they make use of them.
The word class of ideophones is often called phonosemantic to indicate that it is not a grammatical word class in the traditional sense of the word (like 'verb' or 'noun'), but rather a grouping based on form and meaning.
A well known instance of ideophones are onomatopoeic words, i.e., words imitating the sound (of the event) they refer to.
Indeed, ideophone expression or ideophony is characteristic of languages around the world as was amply demonstrated at the International Symposium on Ideophones (University of Cologne) in January 1998.
Gérard Diffloth refers to ideophones as "gesture-images" and he observes, "It is in the area of meaning however that ideophones present the most interesting problems." Wescott and G. Tucker Childs both employ the term "elusiveness" to characterize the semantics of ideophones.
If ideophones are as prominent in the lexicons of most African languages as dictionaries and transcribed folktales indicate, they should feature equally prominently in translated text and yet, this is not the case.
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