A study of 6,000 languages found that humans may innately associate certain sounds with certain concepts. For example, words for "nose" almost always include an "n."
An interesting linguistic typology study finding that sound symbolism is more common than we’d assumed. Excerpt from a good summary of the study in the Washington Post:
If you visited Iceland and asked someone what they called the smelling organ in the middle of their face, they’d tell you, nev. In Japan, it’s hana. To Sar speakers in southern Chad it’s kon, and among the Zuni tribe of the southwestern United States. it’s noli. In fact, you could go to more than 1,400 places around the world, question speakers of more than 1,400 different languages, and hear 1,400 words that contain the sound “n.” But all of them mean the same thing: nose.
That’s one of the findings of a sweeping study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday, which found evidence of strong associations between the sounds in words and the ideas they represent in completely unrelated languages from all corners of the world. Despite a long-standing assumption in linguistics that the sounds we pick to signify certain concepts are arbitrary, the researchers argue that at least some associations are more universal than you’d think. …
A series of studies starting in 1929 have documented what’s called the “bouba/kiki” effect: People from societies across the world almost universally associate round shapes with the made-up word “bouba” and spiky shapes with the non-word “kiki.” …
Christiansen’s work pushes sound symbolism back to the forefront. He and his team, which included statisticians, neuroscientists, physicists and computer scientists, examined the words for 100 concepts in more than 6,000 languages in search of commonalities. They weren’t looking for universal rules — just examples of associations that popped more often than you’d expect due to pure chance. … To eliminate the influence of geographic relationships, shared sounds would only be considered symbolic if they appeared in languages from at least three of the world’s six large and relatively isolated areas: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands, and Australia. …
For a few of Christiansen’s concepts, the explanation appears straightforward. The “n” in nose (andnev and hana and kon and noli) is nasal, requiring that we speak through the very organ we’re trying to describe. Things that are small make high-pitched, squeaking sounds, just like the “i” in tiny, sagheer (Arabic) and liten (Norwegian). For other associations, the link between signal and signified is more opaque.
This doesn’t mean that Saussure was completely wrong about arbitrariness. Though words like nose may share some commonalities, most of the terms in the average adult’s 80,000-word vocabulary represent abstract concepts that aren’t easily represented with concrete sounds. When words for the same concept do resemble each other, it is usually a sign that they share an etymological root.
Here’s the academic paper, Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages by Damián E. Blasi, Søren Wichmann, Harald Hammarström, Peter F. Stadler, and Morten H. Christiansen.
See also the bouba/kiki effect.
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