Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is "a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests a sound that it refers to." The Greek onomatopoiía means "name-making," from ónoma, "name," and poiéō, "to make." Common English onomatopoeias include animal noises such as oink, meow, roar and chirp, plus noise words like beep and hiccup; the article also lists fanfare, pigeon and cough among words that probably began as imitations. Onomatopoeias differ by language, because they "conform to the broader linguistic system": a clock goes tick tock in English and tic tac in Spanish or Italian. Comics run on the device; the article credits Crane with pioneering the sound effects "bam," "pow" and "wham."

For the writer, onomatopoeia is the audible face of imagery, the auditory channel. It gives a narrator or a place a quick signature, and in a conlang the question of which sounds the invented language imitates is worldbuilding in miniature.