Phonemic analysis of animal sounds as spelled in various popular languages
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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.
Sources
-
- IPA interactive charts (International Phonetic Association)
- Phonetics (University of Sheffield)
- Phonemic Inventories and Cultural and Linguistic Information Across Languages (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association)
- Speech Accent Archive (George Mason University)
- Sounds All Around (Chapman, J.)
- Translating Onomatopoeia: An Attempt toward Translation Strategies (Azari, R. and Sharififar, M.)
- How Similar Are Russian And Ukrainian? (Babbel)
- A Comparison between Onomatopoeia and Sound Symbolism in Persian and English (Aliyeh, K. and, Zeinolabedin, R.)
- Natural Phonology of Japanese (Smith, E. R.)
- Areas, Areal Features, and Areality (Cambridge University)
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]
bks said,
March 17, 2025 @ 6:27 am
Cf. the witnesses to orangutan vocalizations in _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_(Poe, 1841).
KeithB said,
March 17, 2025 @ 8:01 am
Had Poe ever even heard an orangutan?
Another interesting animal sound is a rooster crow. IIRC, in Spanish it is nothing like "cock-a-doodle-doo".
languagehat said,
March 17, 2025 @ 8:02 am
A nice find, but you can't trust the audio clips: the Ukrainian cat sound, м’яв, which she correctly transcribes as [mjav], is read out on the audio clip as [ˈɛmjav].
David Marjanović said,
March 17, 2025 @ 8:43 am
English is very much the outlier here; French cocorico, German kikeriki (both stressed on the last syllable).
Scott P. said,
March 17, 2025 @ 8:56 am
" Although onomatopoeia intends to imitate faithfully,"
Is there a justification for thinking this true?
Not a naive speaker said,
March 17, 2025 @ 10:38 am
How much do phonotactics limit the imitation of an animal sound? Are they not enforced with imitation sounds?
Gokul Madhavan said,
March 17, 2025 @ 10:51 am
Can we be sure that these differences are entirely on the human end? Could there be regional differences in the actual sounds the animals are making which are contributing to some of this variation?
Terry K. said,
March 17, 2025 @ 11:32 am
Replying to Gokul Madhavan's comment.
With farm animals and pets, differences in sounds the animals make, if they exist, are going to be by breed, not geographical location. Though which breeds are typical will vary.
That does connect with another thought I had. Some animals make different sounds, and their may be differences in which sound is thought of as the animals main sound. I'm wondering if that contributes to the variety in how pig sounds are described.
Yves Rehbein said,
March 17, 2025 @ 11:59 am
This topic is my pet pieve!
I do not think there is any justification for this.
Ancient Egyptian mjw.t simply means "cat" in the second millenium BCE. Of course it is possible that the Egyptian word is derived from sound symbolism but how would you even proof this without circular reasoning. It is widely assumed that the house cat was domesticated in Egypt after all.
Egyptian m- happens to mean "in" (not an Egyptologist myself, beware), so it's pretty much endemic, whereas in Semitic ma- and mu- are noun forming prefixes which may become rebracketd so you get Akkadian šurānum spelled SA.A where SA seems to be a homograph for É "house" which is believed to have been h initial /haj/ in Sumerian, matching approximately what Carsten Peust's Egyptian Phonology has to say about the origins of /š/, so coptic šau matches conclusively?!? Unfortunatly this wasn't what I came here for and now I have to leave.
Julian said,
March 17, 2025 @ 3:51 pm
I commend Flanders and Swann's song Kokoraki. You can find it on YouTube.
The repeated line is "when I go to the market I will buy you a …." plus an accumulating list of animals. Non Greek speakers might reflect on how easy or hard it is to guess what they are.
The humour is that he's genuinely trying to imitate the sounds, sort of, not saying words like "quack" or "cockadoodledoo".
Bob Ladd said,
March 17, 2025 @ 5:08 pm
@Julian has just highlighted what's wrong with the article being touted in this post. He's correct to point out that "quack" and "oink" are not only rough approximations of animal sounds but in many cases are also actual words of a specific language. The humour in the Flanders & Swann song comes from the fact that those two things are different. I'm very skeptical that English speakers actually *perceive* the sound of a rooster crowing differently from other Europeans – they just have a different onomatopoetic word for it.
Em said,
March 18, 2025 @ 9:21 am
This article is very interesting but like other commenters I find the discussion a bit simplistic. It seems rather obvious that these onomatopeia are at least in part conventional and do not necessarily match a speaker's best attempt at rendering what they actually hear. The English "cock-a-doodle-do" is an obvious, pathological example illustrating this point. The article obscures this by starting from English "meow" which is an extreme in the other direction (it is remarkably close to the actual sound).
In particular, one thing the discussion seems to be missing is that there is no reason for these things to be completely immune to language change, contact etc.. I was thinking about it in particular in connection to the [v] at the end of the Ukrainian and Turkish meow. Do Ukrainians or Turks really hear a [v] here, or is it just an earlier [w] or a [w] in a foreign form that turned into [v]?
Em said,
March 18, 2025 @ 9:32 am
@languagehat : for the French duck sound it is the other way round, the audio is correct [kwæ̃] but the IPA is wrong [kwan] (and then the same with the pig sound). Perhaps a deliberate mistake so they can color the nasality as a separate element.
Andreas Johansson said,
March 18, 2025 @ 10:05 am
@Em
I've seen English "bleat" cited as an onomatopoeion that was felled by linguistic change: when it was coined the vowel was much more open and closer to how sheep actually sound.
Rodger C said,
March 18, 2025 @ 11:00 am
@Em: I believe final /v/ in Ukrainian is pronounced [w] or thereabouts.
Kate Bunting said,
March 18, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
The English woman recorded saying 'moo' makes it sound most un-cow-like – not at all how I would say it.
Nhan Hong said,
March 19, 2025 @ 2:39 am
Oh, the rooster sound has more syllables others'. It's ò-ó-o-o.. in Vietnamese.
Nhan Hong said,
March 19, 2025 @ 2:40 am
Oh, the rooster sound has more syllables than others'. It's ò-ó-o-o.. in Vietnamese.
John Tkacik said,
March 19, 2025 @ 10:05 am
Do not forget the ancient Roman dictum of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation
Suetonius, De Naturis Animantium says “Geese honk [gliccere vel sclingere], ducks quack [anatum tetrissitare], and peacocks ‘paupulare’,”
at https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/09/21/zooglossia-animal-sounds-in-latin-and-greek/
David Marjanović said,
March 20, 2025 @ 1:41 pm
Don't know about Turkish, but the Ukrainian "v" is a wide-open [ʋ] – close enough.
However, my favorite example of language change in onomatopoetic words is /piːp/ for the sounds of mice and little birds. In English that ended up as pipe up, but that's nothing: in German it ended up as pfeifen, which was reinterpreted according to its new sound and now means "whistle". Little birds and mice, meanwhile, make piep piep once again when they speak German.
Less spectacularly, Shakespeare: "Why should […] hatefull Kuckcowes hatch in Sparrows nests?" Yes, it means "cuckoos", but it's the regular descendant of the Middle English form (cuccu, cokkou), which, BTW, is also the first part of cuckold. The last known occurrence of cuckow is from 1797; is was replaced by the entirely new cuckoo from the 16th century onwards.
Ryan said,
March 20, 2025 @ 10:03 pm
> Can we be sure that these differences are entirely on the human end? Could there be regional differences in the actual sounds the animals are making which are contributing to some of this variation?
There are the known changes, like the great caprine vowel shift that drew the meh-sayer goats away from their bah-barian sheep cousins. And cats living among indo-europeans palatalized their m’s leading to miao from the mao voiced by neolithic cats and their Basque descendants. Surprisingly little work has been done on canine dialectology.
While pigeons say pruu in Portugual vs coo (<qu ) in England, the p-Columba / q-Columba division is now thought to be an areal effect not useful for cladistics.
Lasius said,
March 21, 2025 @ 4:19 am
@John Tkacik
This likely inspired the medieval song "Iam vernali tempore", recorded in the Carmina Burana as song number 132.
Speedwell said,
March 21, 2025 @ 5:52 am
I moved to Ireland from Texas with two 20-year-old cats, both natives of Houston. They sounded similar to other Houston cats. I didn't realise there was any sort of locality difference in vocalisations until I began to catch a certain chirrupy utterance in the noises Irish cats made. Then I adopted a young tabby tom from deep in south Sligo, a fellow who isn't shy about telling me he wants something, and when the young tom "chattered" to me, the Houstonian little old lady would give me a pleading look and meow. If I assumed they were expressing the same need (food, for example), about half the time I would find out it wasn't the correct assumption. I guessed she was objecting to the young tom's "utterance". This can probably happen only in households with indoor cats who associate only with humans and other household cats, so I can't absolutely claim it is a regional difference. But I bet I can distinguish by ear between the meaning-sounds-to-humans of Houston cats and those of Northwest Irish cats.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
March 21, 2025 @ 8:32 am
Speedwell,
Irish cats lilt?
I was inclined to dismiss this as bull-s**t/blatherskite (let's be bi-dialectical), but then I remembered reading somewhere that feral cats don't vocalize past kittenhood (excepting when in heat or inter-feline combat); only cats in regular contact with people do. In other words, cats "learn" which sounds get their human masters/slaves to give them food, water, head-scratchings, etc. So, if that's true, it's not a big logical leap to then conclude that the sounds a Texan tabby has to make to get obeisance from a cowboy might be different from those required in an Ersophone environment. After all, a cat's prefrontal cortex is more developed than that of, say, an African gray parrot, no?
It's a shame cats can't muster up a dental fricative — that would prove the case conclusively one way or another, would'nt' it', now?
John Tkacik said,
March 22, 2025 @ 3:16 pm
To Lasius….
Brilliant … positively encyclopedic…
a medieval cognate of Tom Lehrer's "The Elements"
Too bad Carl Orff didn't set it to music.
https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost13/CarminaBurana/bur_cam5.html#132
132
Philippus Cancellarius
(ca. 1170 – 1236)
1a.
Iam vernali tempore
terra viret germine,
sol novo cum iubare.
frondent nemora,
candent lilia,
florent omnia.
1b.
Est celi serenitas,
aeris suavitas,
ventorum tranquillitas;
est temperies
clara et dies,
cantant volucres:
2a.
Merulus cincitat,
acredula rupillulat,
turdus truculatet
sturnus pusitat,
turtur gemitat,
palumbes plausitat,
perdix cicabat,
anser craccitat,
cignus drensat,
pavo paululat,
gallina gacillat,
ciconia clocturat,
pica concinnat,
hirundo et trisphat,
apes bombilat,
merops sincidulat.
2b.
Bubo bubilatet
guculus guculat,
passer sonstitiatet
corvus croccitat,
vultur pulpat,
accipiter pipat,
carrus titubat,
cornix garrulat,
aquila clangit,
milvus lipit,
anas tetrinnit,
graculus fringit,
vespertilio et stridit,
butio et butit,
grus et grurit,
cicada fretendit.
Onager mugilat,
et tigris raceat,
cervus docitat,
et verres quirritat,
leo rugit,
pardus ferit,
panther caurit,
elephans barrit,
linx et frennit,
aper frendit,
aries braterat,
ovis atque balat,
taurus mugit,
equus et hinnit.
3b.
Lepus vagit,
et vulpis gannit,
ursus uncat,
et lupus ululat,
canis latrat,
catulus glutinat,
rana coaxat,
anguis sibilat,
grillus grillat,
sorex desticat,
mus et minnit,
mustela drindrit,
sus et grunnit,
asinus et rudit.
4.
He sunt voces volucrum necnon quadrupedum,
quarum modulamina
vincit phenix unica.
5a.
Iam horrifer Aquilosuavi cedit Zephiro,sole in estiferodegente domicilio.dulcisona resonat harundo.floride cum floridisflorent vites pampinis.odoriferasurgunt gramina,gaudet agricola.
5b.
Nunc dracones fluminumscatent emanantium;imber saluberrimusirrigat terram funditus;cataractas reserat Olimpus.redolent aromata,cum cinnamomo balsama.virent viola,rosa et ambrosia.coeunt animalia.
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