During the pandemic, many of us have felt our stress levels rise every time we hear the word “virus”. But few people realise that just the sound of the word virus alone is likely to raise the blood pressure — and would have done so even before COVID-19 figured large in the headlines.

We’ve all experienced how certain sounds can grate on our nerves, such as the noise made by dragging your fingernails across a blackboard or the cry of a baby, but it turns out that the sounds of some words (like “virus”) can also affect how we feel and even give us a clue to what they mean (something to avoid). This phenomenon, where the sound of a word triggers an emotion or a meaning, is referred to as “sound symbolism”. Yet the idea that there might be a link between the sound of words and their meaning flies against accepted linguistic thinking going back more than a century.

In our book, The Language Game: How Improvisations Created Language and Changed the World, we outline a radically new perspective on how we, as humans, got language in the first place, how children can learn and use it so effortlessly, and how sound symbolism figures into this.

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