Abstract This article describes ideophones in Leggbo, a Cross River language of Nigeria. It focuses on two processes – fortition and reduplication – in the language and their special relation to ideophones. Fortition involves consonant gemination and lengthening and is used for intensification. Reduplication can be either lexical or grammatical. Ideophones can have an inherent repetitive structure but they can also employ reduplication like other modifiers to signal the plurality of nouns, or the diminutive of verbs. Both fortition and reduplication can occur in the same form, especially in ideophones. It is speculated that fortition could have arisen diachronically in ideophones before spreading to other parts of the language. If this scenario is assumed, it argues for treating ideophones in Leggbo, if not in other languages, as central rather than marginal parts of linguistic systems.