Published in The Ideophone
Author Mark Dingemanse
![](https://ideophone.org/files/dirge.jpg)
Funeral dirges ( sìnɔ in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.