The Dog Says “Wang-Wang”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Claude Van Der Veen from Milwaukee.

Hi, Claude. Welcome.

Hey, buddy. What’s up? What can we help you with?

Hi, Grant. Some while ago, I heard that dogs in China don’t say woof-woof. They say wang-wang.

And I was wondering if you know of any studies of what do animals say in other countries?

Yes. Yes, we do.

This is a good question. Now, where were you reading about wang wanging is what dogs say in Chinese?

I honestly don’t remember. This is about 40 years ago when I lived in Michigan.

A friend was in a linguistics class and she was looking for something.

And I heard it even before then. So 40 years ago, I don’t have a clue where I heard this.

There is a motherlode of these sorts of things on Wikipedia.

Now, if you listen to the show a lot, you know I have mixed feelings about Wikipedia.

Sometimes you get exactly what you came for, sometimes you don’t.

But this is a pretty good list, and it’s called cross-linguistic onomatopoeias.

That’s O-N-O-M-A-T-O-P-O-E-I-A-S, cross-linguistic onomatopoeias.

And it is a giant, giant page of things like what a baby crying is represented as in other language,

What a horn honking is, or a hushing noise, the noise that you make when you want somebody to go,

Oh, yeah.

Tons of these, and they’re wonderful.

Sometimes they’re written in another alphabet, so it might take you some time to puzzle them out.

But what we find here is the strong evidence that there’s this class of sound,

Or this class of word, an onomatopoeia or an imitative word,

That exists in every language that we know.

And this word usually represents sounds according to the inventory of the language spoken there.

So by inventory, I mean every language has these sounds that it uses,

And it doesn’t use other sounds that may exist in other languages.

And so we make these conform to our orthography and to our pronunciation and to even just the way our mouths move when we say words, which is why they look different but kind of do the job.

And, you know, in English, which is this weird hybrid language, we’ve got more than one for a dog.

We have woof.

We have arf.

We have bow wow.

We have bow wow.

And you’ll find this again and again happens in many different languages.

I always thought when I was younger that the different sounds for the dog barking in English had to do with the size of the dog.

I thought it was regional dialects.

New England dogs.

I can always think of a Scotty doing arf, arf, arf.

I don’t know.

But anyway, that’s the short circuit right to the motherlode right there,

Cross-linguistic onomatopoeia on Wikipedia.

Do they have things like owls and pigeons and crows?

They have flatulence.

They have the sound of food being eaten, which I love because many of them,

It’s nom-nom or myum-myum, something like that.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

Keyboard striking.

Oh, this is great.

What a siren is.

A siren in Catalan is,

Ni-nu, ni-nu, ni.

Because in Europe,

The sirens tend to sound like

Ni-nu, ni-nu, right?

Sure.

Telephone ringing.

In Indonesian,

Kring, kring.

In Italian,

Drin, drin.

Thunder.

I wonder if guitars go twang, twang.

That’s a great one.

I don’t see it here on the list,

But you know what?

Everybody can check it out.

Cross-linguistic onomatopoeia.

Oh, my God.

Wikipedia.

Going to satisfy your need to know more about this, all right?

I have my Saturday night planned out right now.

Claude, I hope that helps.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure. Take care now.

Bye, Claude.

Bye-bye.

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