The English language is filled with many subtle rules many of us do not tend to pay attention to. From frozen binomials and the order of adjectives, these grammatical rules are often long fixed in the noggins of English speakers, often realised by surprise, revelation or curiosity. Previously, we have covered why “bread and butter” sounds okay, but “butter and bread” does not. Today, I want to look into another pattern of word or phrase formation, one that concerns a rather interesting sequence of vowels that we say almost naturally, but do not really question why.

An example of this pattern can be seen in onomatopoeia, like the rain going ‘pitter-patter’, clocks going ‘tick-tock’, and playing with water could be said to make a ‘splish-splash’ sound. Mechanical keyboards may also go ‘click-clack’, and the footwear Australians refer to as a ‘thong’, and some of us refer to as a ‘slipper’, is also called by the sound it makes, ‘flip-flop’. Another example of this may also be seen in some colloquial expressions, like a disorderly group of things called a ‘mish-mash’, the act of idling around called ‘dilly-dally’, and making small talk may also be referred to as having a ‘chit-chat’.

This pattern may also permeate the formation of brand or product names as well. For instance, the 1933 film depicting an oversized ape is called King Kong, a popular chocolate wafer snack goes by the name KitKat, and a popular but controversial social media platform goes by the name TikTok. This may also occur in non-anglophone brand names as well, as exemplified by a German soda name Schwip Schwap, which could technically trace its name back to the reduplicated form of the verb ‘to slosh’, schwappen.

When we break down how these words and names are structured, we find that these words or phrases involve a duplication of a word, in part or in full, and the alteration of a vowel. If the first word has an ‘i’ in it, this would change to an ‘a’ or ‘o’ in the duplicated word. Additionally, if such a duplicated sequence contains three words, then the vowels would almost always occur as a sequence ‘i – a – o’, like ‘tic-tac-toe’. This phenomenon is called ablaut reduplication.

Ablaut reduplication is not unique to the English language; examples of this can also be found in other Indo-European languages such as German, in which we can find examples like plitschplatsch, derived from platschen (to splash), and Wirrwarr (confused, confusion, from Wirr). Interestingly, there is also a dish in Bulgarian cuisine which name also displays ablaut reduplication, called mish-mash (Миш-маш). But beyond the Indo-European languages, this vowel pattern is also attested in languages like Thai and Bahasa Indonesia, and additionally, reduplication is a fairly common occurrence in many of the world’s languages.

Ablaut is defined as a particular type of a pattern of vowel variations that occur in the Indo-European languages. But to refer to vowel variation patterns outside this language family, another term called ‘apophony’ is used instead. Such a pattern has been recorded as early as 800 BCE, which noted the presence of different kinds of alterations to vowels referred to today as the ‘full grade’ and the ‘lengthened grade’. In Europe, it was not until relatively recently when this phenomenon was described and studied. However, this was when the term ablaut was first applied to refer to this particular phenomenon, meaning ‘sound reduction’. This term was established in linguistics in the 19th century, and you can find mentions or descriptions in publications such as Jacob Grimm’s 1819 Deutsche Grammatik.

To understand this pattern, let’s pronounce the words tic-tac-toe, a sequence of words displaying ablaut. This generally carries the vowels along the lines of i-e-o. Try to feel the position of your tongue as you articulate these vowels, do you feel a pattern? That is right, with each progressive syllable, the vowel progresses from a front to a back vowel. This front-to-back pattern is a form of vowel gradation, and English shares this pattern of vowel gradation to different extents with its Indo-European cousins.

This led linguists to reconstruct the common ancestor of these languages, called Proto Indo-European or PIE. Within PIE, they posited that /e/ was an inherent vowel, which may be altered to an /o/ sound. Additionally, vowels may be lengthened to /e:/ or /o:/, or even be omitted (zero grade). This was the main ablaut proposed in PIE, which over time and diversification, has developed into other patterns, which may be more complex, or may not fully reflect the pattern used by PIE.

Nevertheless, this had subsequent implications not only in the development of words or phrases demonstrating ablaut reduplication, but also some verb paradigms in languages like English, giving some special forms to verbs that we might refer to as “irregular”. One example is the paradigm for the verb ‘to sing’, which becomes ‘sang’ in the past or preterite tense, and ‘sung’ in the past participle. Notice the front-to-back pattern in these tenses, similar to how it occurs in tic-tac-toe.

Interestingly, ablaut appears to override other hidden grammatical rules in English, particularly the order of adjectives. One of the most commonly cited examples is the ‘big bad wolf’, which follows the ablaut pattern of ɪ-æ-ʊ. However, this phrasing, which sounds natural to native English speakers, violates the order of adjectives that go opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose. Thus, if we exclusively follow this particular grammatical rule, the technically grammatically correct order should have been ‘bad big wolf’ (opinion – size).

This is not the only type of reduplication pattern that occurs in English, however. If you are familiar with words and phrases like Joe Schmoe and fancy schmancy, this would be a form of another reduplication pattern called shm-reduplication. Similarly, for heebie-jeebies, holy-moly, and hanky-panky, another reduplication pattern is used here, called rhyming reduplication. A commonality amongst these patterns of reduplication is, they typically give us words and phrases that are more often than not used in informal contexts, meant to express various things, actions, or descriptors used in everyday speech. I think this goes to show how some expressions may be innovated in colloquial contexts, which can enter conventional use over time.

Further Reading

Grimm, J. (1819) Deutsche Grammatik, Göttingen, Bei Dieterich.

Kentner, G. (2017) ‘On the emergence of reduplication in German morphophonology’, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 36(2), pp. 233-277.

Kentner, G. (2023) ‘Reduplication as expressive morphology in German’, In: Williams, J. (Ed.): Expressivity in European Languages, Cambridge University Press, pp. 103-119.

Minkova, D. (2002) ‘Ablaut reduplication in English: the criss-crossing of prosody and verbal art’, English Language and Linguistics, 6(1), pp. 133-169.

Wivell, G., Miatto, V., Karakaş, A., Kostyszyn, K. & Repetti, L. (2024) ‘All about ablaut: a typology of ablaut reduplicative structures’, Linguistic Typology, 28(3), pp. 505-536.