Dagapya Sound Symbolism

September 28, 2026 - Published

Dagapya is a constructed language I created, and one of its big pulls is that it's based on sound symbolism. Sound symbolism is basically the idea that the meanings of words in language are linked to specific speech sounds. The most famous of these is the kiki-bouba effect, where participants across cultures, age groups, etc. would overwhelmingly choose that a spiky shape would be named "kiki" and a rounded shape "bouba."

When I first started Dagapya, I had the impression that sound symbolism wasn't very proven outside of a few small studies, but when I looked into it, there actually seemed to be a surprising amount of support for the theory. So, how did I implement sound symbolism into Dagapya?

Studies

There are some studies examining the relationship between certain sounds and certain concepts. You can find a good example here that I used as the basis for some core vocabulary. Here are a list of some Dagapya words I could find that were based on these studies:

• bena (nose): association with /n/

• hami (yawn): association with /a/

• lina (tongue): association with /l/ -- compare English "lingual"

• koka (bone): association with /k/ -- compare English "skeleton"

• kya (what), kay (question): question words associated with /a/

• pin (this): association with high front vowels like /i/

• san (that): association with low/back vowels like /u/, which includes /a/

• doy (big): association with low/back vowels like /u/ and /a/, which includes /o/

• tin ([diminutive]): smallness associated with high front vowels like /i/ and consonants /t/ and /k/

• pome (soft): association with rounded vowels like /o/ and /u/ and bilabial consonants like /m/ /p/ /b/

• doka (knee): association with rounded vowels like /o/

• mumi (suck): association with /m/ /n/ and /u/

However, these studies are a bit limited. Their focus is more on making sure that the sounds are consistent between words that are related. This is much easier for concrete words like body parts where the definition won't be as varied, but a lot harder for ambiguous concepts like "happiness" or "seven." Of course, for my language to be functioning, I wanted to be able to include these types of words. Despite being much less scientific, there was only really one way to do that while still including sound symbolism.

Translations

In order to get sound symbolism for words that aren't included in studies, all I had to do was get translations of the word in different languages and compare their sounds. Of course, I wasn't going to look for every single synonym of every single word in every single language, because that would be impractical. Since Dagapya was initially meant to be an auxlang, I looked at my favorite list of languages based on number of speakers, and the main languages I used were English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, and Japanese. The first 5 are the 5 most spoken languages, and Japanese was a sort of control language since it's both unrelated to the other languages (in terms of language family) and has a phonology very close to Dagapya.

As a comparison, Mandarin Chinese has a very different phonology, and the sounds (from pinyin) t j q ch z c usually only have one close equivalent in Dagapya, being "t," which would introduce large bias for that specific letter. Japanese is mostly 1:1 with Dagapya's sounds, so this would offset that bias. Additionally, English and Spanish are pretty closely related, so I was actually biased against English for most words, using it primarily as confirmation for sound trends. Otherwise, this group of languages are mostly unrelated, and their large number of speakers would mean that most words should feel familiar to most people. I also pulled in other languages on occasion to help find trends, but generally...

Most words did not appear to have very strong trends across languages!

I'm sure some patterns could appear if I had explored more synonyms and related words, but that's very difficult and I'm only one person. Still, this was about expected (what sound would even persist across languages for the concept of "jealousy"?). I'll be highlighting some neat words that DID seem to have sound symbolism between languages, whether or not that was the expected result. A neat way to find them is actually to just see if they have similarities to English words, since I was generally biased against them, so a word in Dagapya being similar to English usually means that there was a strong trend across languages for it.

• katyo (knife, blade) - strong association with /k/ and /t/ (or /tʃ/)

  • English: cutter

  • Spanish: cuchilla

  • Hindi: चाक़ू (cāqū)

  • Arabic: سِكِّين (sikkīn)

  • Mandarin Chinese: 刀 (dāo)

  • Japanese: 刀 (tō), 刀 (katana)

• limya (milk) - strong association with /l/ and nasals (n/m)

  • English: milk, lactation

  • Spanish: leche

  • Hindi: दूध (dūdh)

  • Arabic: حَلِيب (ḥalīb), لَبَن (laban) 

  • Mandarin Chinese: 牛奶 (niúnǎi), 乳 (rǔ)

  • Japanese: 牛乳 (gyūnyū), 乳 (chichi)

• popay (grape) - strong association with bilabial plosives (b/p)

  • English: grapes

  • Spanish: uva

  • Hindi: अंगूर (aṅgūr)

  • Arabic: عِنَب (ʕinab)

  • Mandarin Chinese: 葡萄 (pútáo)

  • Japanese: ブドウ (budō)

• kuti (breathe) - association with /t/ and /s/ sounds

  • English: breath, respire

  • Spanish: respirar

  • Hindi: सांस लेना (sāns lenā)

  • Arabic: تَنَفَّسَ (tanaffasa)

  • Mandarin Chinese: 呼吸 (hūxī)

  • Japanese: 吸う(sū), 吐く(tsuku), 呼吸 (kokyū)

This article will be updated as I get more examples!

• Vecderg