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This is something I've been waiting for for decades:

"Onomatopoeia Odyssey:  How do animals sound across languages?", by Vivian Li, The Pudding (March, 2025)

Let’s take a look at how a few animals sound across 21 popular languages. In the following examples, phones are grouped and color-coded to show their phonetic similarity. For instance, [m] and [n] are both nasal consonants and serve a similar purpose as the start of the cat sound, so they’re grouped together for simplicity.  [i] and [j] both make an “eee” sound, so they’re both shown as yellow.

Typographically, this article is quite a tour de force.  It highlights individual phones in different colors, which graphically assists in the analysis of phonemic groups.  It also accompanies the phones with recordings, so you can both see and hear the phonemic classes.   I can't reproduce that audio-visual complexity in this blog post, so I strongly encourage you to look at the original article here — after you read the following summary on Language Log.

By the way, captions (descriptive, explanatory, analytical — with colors and recordings!) float across the screen, which is striking, and the panoply of color-coded phonemes is visually arresting:  you can almost see the sequences of phonemes.

The three animal sounds phonemically represented are those of the cat, the duck, and the pig, each as transcribed for 21 languages:  Arabic, Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

After the presentation and close phonemic analysis of human perception of the sounds made by cats, ducks, and pigs, the article concludes:

Onomatopoeia offers a fascinating glimpse into the interaction between sound and language. The way humans mimic animal sounds reflects not only shared biological instincts but also distinct cultural filters. Although onomatopoeia intends to imitate faithfully, its differences are ultimately far from arbitrary. In trying to capture the same auditory essence, English interprets a pig’s sound as [ojŋk], yet Hungarian hears [røf], and Vietnamese hears [ʔut it]. Even among the three animals discussed, cats are more consistent in their sound interpretation, while pigs are more variable — whether because pigs’ vocalizations are innately more complex, or because they call upon different phonotactic rules.

The trends uncovered in animal sounds — like the recurrence of [m], [i], [a], and [u] across languages for cats — demonstrate a universal ability for sound interpretation to transcend linguistic differences. In fact, English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish all share very similar onomatopoeic sounds across all three animals. The [miau] trend shared among 15 languages could explain how “sad AI cat song” stories on social media can effortlessly relate to a global audience.

On the other hand, deviations highlight the unique preferences and creative adaptations of each language, such as Turkish and Ukrainian ending with [v] or Korean and Indonesian adding [ŋ]. There are countless reasons behind the similarities and differences in onomatopoeic translations, from geographic proximity and shared language family groups to different phonemic inventories and speech preferences. These variations remind us that even the simplest forms of language carry deep cultural influence.

This interplay between universality and diversity extends beyond animal sounds, touching on how humans perceive and encode the world. Onomatopoeia is a seemingly trivial aspect of language, but one that reflects broader cultural and linguistic processes. Exploring these differences in sound perception challenges us to think critically about the assumptions we bring to language. If a cow’s moo can interpreted so differently across cultures, how many other sounds might we experience uniquely through our linguistic filters? Whether cows go “moo”, “meuh”, or “음메”, onomatopoeia connects us to the natural world in a way that transcends linguistic boundaries. It invites us to play with sound, to embrace the quirks of language, and to recognize our shared instinct to listen and interpret. In doing so, onomatopoeia reminds us that even the simplest of sounds can tell a universal story, endlessly fascinating in its infinite variations.

What is most amazing to me is that, although the phonetic transcriptions of the different languages may graphically look and even sound quite dissimilar, close analysis of the phone groups (of which there are at least 13) show that phonemically the sounds made by the animals across the world are cognate in cat-speak, duck-speak, pig-speak, and so forth.

This is a different phenomenon from whale speech, bird chatter, dog talk, and so on. This is how humans perceive what sounds different animals make, not an attempt to comprehend how animals communicate among themselves.

Selected readings

• "So many words for 'donkey'" (3/17/23)
• "Cat got your tongue? Or do you have its?" (6/17/22)
• "Cat huffing and snorting in Japanese and Chinese" (6/15/22)
• "Canine intonations" (3/21/22)
• "Annals of interspecies communication" (2/8/21)
• "Canine backtalk" (10/25/19)
• "Calling (a) moose" (3/14/19)

[h.t. Christian Horn]

March 17, 2025 @ 5:31 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Animal communication, Onomatopoeia, Phonetics and phonology, Spelling

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