Dogs speaking with accents

Like all children I learned to express the sounds that animals make through the onomatopoeic words we use to describe them, for example sheep saying “baa” and dogs saying “woof”. Imagine my disappointment upon meeting Japanese people and finding out that this may not be the universal language of animals.

Surprisingly, I was told that animals in Japan speak in their own particular manner with dogs saying ”won won” while pigs far from saying “oink oink” make noises like “bhuu bhuu” ( sorry no Dr. Doolittle I, in transliterating animal sounds). Was this another point of Japanese exceptionalism, perhaps brought on by the aforementioned Evolutionary Biogeography or could our universal theory be wrong ?

Much like if the laws of gravity were inapplicable in some part of the earth, this type of discontinuity in scientific laws is always of interest to me. So I determined to make research in this matter one of my priorities on my trip to Japan. After multiple visits to investigate this phenomenon, I can assure the reader that no such anomaly exists and animals in Japan speak in the same global language we’ve codified so well in America.

The only rational explanation therefore is that Japanese are unable to understand the true sounds that animals make due to the limitations of their phonetic system, which has only thirteen consonants and five vowels.

Interestingly sound effects are also expressed differently in Japan as anyone who reads manga can tell. When a car takes off quickly rather than “zoom”, it sounds like “hyu-n” and punches land not with the canonical “pow” or “wham” but with noises like “baki !” or “don”. For those interested in further research on this topic, this blog has a great collection of sounds found in manga.

I’ve been looking for some academic work in this area but outside of references to a missing work by Professor Whitman of Cornell called “Chit-chat among Japanese Farm Animals", I can’t find any source material I can pass on. So in true academic fashion I’ll consider this to be an exercise left to the reader.