Even though animals of the same species will generally make the same noises wherever they are on the planet, how we convert them into human sounds often differs by language and country.
For example, if English is your first language, you’ll know that Old MacDonald’s famously noisy farm is full of pigs that oink. But did you know that pigs boo boo in Japan and nöff-nöff in Sweden?
But when it comes to the creatures we want to understand the most - our pets - we can thank the animal-loving analysts at WordTips for finding out how dogs and cats - the world’s two most popular pets - sound around the world.
Woof, woof is the standard interpretation of a dog’s bark in 13 English-speaking countries, including the U.S., Canada and several Caribbean nations. However, in 19 Spanish-speaking countries, the noise a dog makes is written as guau, guau, and the standard in 22 mostly Arabic-speaking countries is hau, hau or how, how.
The list doesn’t stop there. The researchers counted over 40 different phrases around the world for the same noise, among them bho, bho in India, ave, ave in Macedonia and oaf, oaf in France.
These interpretations vary so much because they’re largely onomatopoeic (meaning they are written exactly how they sound), and how they are written partly depends on linguistic rules. For example, according to linguist Anthea Fraser Gupta, this explains why a dog makes a woof sound in English-speaking countries but a wāng sound in China - words can’t end in ‘f’ in Mandarin Chinese.
Unlike a dog’s bark, cat noises are interpreted fairly consistently across the world. The WordTip researchers found that cats meow in 22 countries, including English-speaking countries like the U.S., the UK and Australia, and select non-English-speaking countries like Tanzania and Armenia. Elsewhere, cats are most likely to make a similar onomatopoeic noise beginning with an m, like miau, miaou or muwaa.
In other countries, someone imitating a cat will make a similar sound beginning with ‘n.’ These countries include Greece (niaou), Malaysia (ngiau) and Japan (nyaa). In some cultures, it’s believed that cats were originally named after their characteristic meow - in cat-loving Ancient Egypt, for example, our feline friends were known as ‘miu.’
According to the ASPCA, a cat uses its distinctive meow to communicate. As kittens, cats will meow to their moms if they’re hungry or cold, and adult cats exclusively meow to their human companions for attention or to say hello.
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