This may be something you’ve never considered before, but animals in different countries make different noises than they do here, or at least they are perceived to. For example, a chicken may ‘cluck’ in English, but it says ‘caca-racá’ in Spanish, ‘cotcotcodet’ in French, ‘tok tok’ in Dutch, and ‘gut gut gdak’ in Turkish.

The reason for these apparently different animal calls is a mixture of the way different languages process different sounds, and the impact this has on their perception of the noise. Also, because our ‘meow,’ for example, is an imperfect human attempt at reproducing the sound a cat makes, it will not sound exactly the same as the reproduction made by a Danish (‘mjav’) or Japanese person (‘nyaa’), with their varying pronunciations and linguistic traditions.

While this is all very interesting to me, it doesn’t actually tell me what I was hoping to find out when researching this post: do they actually sound different? Well, according to an article I found on the BBC website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5277090.stm), yes they do. It has been found that cows’ moos vary according to herd and region. Some further internet surfing also tells me that several other animals are believed to have ‘accents,’ including some frogs.

So it would appear that animals have accents just like we do, and though it’s hard to say how much of these differences are due to actual vocal variation, and how much is just a matter of perception, it’s something which really makes you think about the effect environmental factors have on language. If we were to consider each group of people speaking with a certain accent as a ‘herd,’ then perhaps we could compare the variations in speech between both human ‘herds’ and the animal herds from the same area. If anyone knows of a similar study ever having been made, I’d love to hear about it!
What do you think? What noises do your pets make?