Are German Pokémon Names Sound-Symbolic?

Aleksandra Ćwiek
Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany

Keywords: sound symbolism, iconicity, cross-modal correspondence, language-specific

At least since the beginning of the 20th century (e.g., Wells 1919, Sapir 1929, Newman 1933),
researchers have been absorbed with sound symbolism – a correspondence between certain
sounds and particular meanings or characteristics (Hinton et al. 1994). Recent research reveals
that the potential of sound symbolism is widely present in fictional character names. This study
follows the interest in sound symbolism within the Pokémon universe.
In a 2018 study, Kawahara et al. examined the effect of voiced obstruents, the number
of moras, and vowel quality on Pokémon attributes height, weight, strength, and evolution. The
authors found positive correlations among all or almost all Pokémon characteristics with the
number of voiced obstruents and the number of moras. Subsequent research extended Kawahara
et al.'s (2018) findings onto further languages. Shih et al. (2019) revealed cross-linguistic
differences and similarities in sound symbolism, for example, how mora, syllable, or segment
counts are used similarly to signal Pokémon evolution stage across those languages.
The current study aims to shed light on the sound symbolic nature of German Pokémon
names. The hypotheses are based on previous findings by Kawahara et al. (2018) and Shih et
al. (2019). First-generation Pokémon names were used in the analysis (N = 151). To determine
the relationships between Pokémon attributes and linguistic features, a conservative two-step
analysis with Bayes Factor correlations and Bayesian hierarchical models was used.
Different from the languages investigated by Kawahara et al. (2018) and Shih et al.
(2019), the results reveal only a few sound-symbolic relationships in German Pokémon names
among the investigated features. Like Shih et al.’s (2019) results for English, we found a strong
negative correlation between weight and the number of labial consonants (BF10 = 11.15). Other
than that, the data revealed anecdotal evidence for a positive correlation between defense and
the number of back vowels (BF10 = 1.71), as well as anecdotal evidence for a negative
correlation between special defense and the number of high vowels (BF10 = 1.58). The results
are interpreted in line with the “frequency code” (Ohala 1994).
The overall weak representation of robust sound-symbolic correspondences in German
Pokémon names suggests that sound symbolism may be governed by language-specific factors,
such as phonotactics, or phonology. German is an example of a language with a complex
syllable structure, and consonant clusters both in the onset and the coda (Hoole et al. 2012). It
also exhibits phonological features, which have not been covered by former and the current
analyses, such as long–short, tense–lax, or rounded–unrounded vowel oppositions. The
phonotactic and phonological structure of a language may, thus, be a window for studying
sound symbolism. To outline the language-specific and cross-linguistic phenomena in sound
symbolism, I discuss its overall potential, e.g., based on the established cross-modal
correspondences (Spence 2011). I conclude that German Pokémon names are sound-symbolic
but in their very own way.
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