Ideophonic patterns in Kiranti languages and beyond

Abstract This article looks at descriptions of ideophones in Kiranti (Sino-Tibetan, Eastern Nepal) languages. It will do so by first providing a description of the ideophones of Thulung, for which four distinct ideophone types are identified, on the basis of a 10 h narrative corpus. Next, the results of this analysis will be compared to descriptions of ideophonic lexemes in sources on other Kiranti languages. In order to place these topics within an areal perspective, descriptions of the same phenomena in Nepali, the contact language for the linguistic area in question, will also be looked at. The goal of the article is to present data on the ideophonic patterns found in the Kiranti linguistic area and to consider the question of borrowing for ideophones in the Himalayas.