It is amazing how different people around the world hear the sounds of the same animals. I always find this fascinating at least. Since I have been talking about onomatopoeia in the last few posts I thought I would share with you the way the sounds of some different animals are heard and written in English. Some of these are a little different from the verbs used to describe these sound, which I listed yesterday. I have noted the words below that cannot be used (or usually are not used) as verbs with an asterisks (*). All the other words can be turned into verbs and conjugated. I have also included a video below of a children’s song that you can listen to in order to hear how all of these examples of onomatopoeia sound. Something else to note about writing animal sounds in English is that often the words are written with repeated letters to emphasize the sounds, for example: buzz (the sounds many insects make) may be written as “buzzzzzzzzzzzz” or moo (the sound a cow makes) may be written as “mooooooooo”. Also some animal sounds are written twice connected by a hyphen, for example: cluck-cluck (the sound a chicken makes). I have noted the most common examples of this below.
I would love if you left a comment on this post telling us all how people hear these same animal sounds differently in the language you speak.
Below I have written the animal’s name, with its sound(s) after the colon. Remember words with * should not be made into verbs.
bee: buzz (also written bzz)
bear: grrr*, growl
birds: cheep-cheep*, chirp, tweet*, squawk
cats: meow, purr
chicken: cluck (or cluck-cluck)
dog: arf*, woof* (or woof-woof), ruff* (or ruff-ruff), bow wow*, bark
duck: quack (or quack-quack)
frog: croak, ribbit (or ribbit-ribbit)
sheep or goat: baa*
pig: oink (or oink-oink)
mouse: squeak (or squeak-squeak)
tiger: grrr*, raaa*, growl, roar
turkey: gobble (or gobble-gobble)
wolves: ou ou ouooooo*, howl