Animal sounds in different languages

Animal sounds in different languages are a small lesson in how each language hears the world. A dog says woof in English, guau guau in Spanish, wau wau in German, bau bau in Italian, au au in Portuguese and 汪汪 wāng wāng in Mandarin. The dog is the same everywhere; what changes is the set of sounds each language has to write it with. Below are the commonest animals in the nine languages Verbavia teaches, including Shanghainese and te reo Māori, and the reasons the same bark comes out so differently.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 5 min read

Animal sounds in seven languages

The forms are those collected in Wikipedia's comparison of onomatopoeia across languages, which cites a dictionary or teaching source for most of them. A blank means no form is listed there.

A few things to notice. The cat is almost the same everywhere, because miau is close to what a cat actually does and every one of these languages has an m, an i and an au. The rooster is where languages part company most: cock-a-doodle-doo, quiquiriquí, cocorico, kikeriki. And Spanish guau has a g where English has a w, because Spanish words do not normally begin with a bare w.

Esperanto: verbs, not noises

Esperanto has a few sound words of its own, recorded in Wiktionary: the cat says miaŭ and the rooster kokeriko, and a frog's croak is kvak. More often Esperanto names the sound with a verb, built on its regular -i ending:

So la hundo bojas is "the dog barks", and the noun bojo is "a bark". Because every Esperanto verb works the same way, learning one animal verb teaches the pattern for all of them: see is Esperanto vocabulary easier.

Shanghainese: the same characters, its own sounds

Shanghainese writes animal noises with the same characters as Mandarin, and reads them with its own sounds. Wiktionary records the Shanghainese reading of the dog's bark: 汪汪 is uaon uaon in the Wugniu romanisation, where Mandarin says wāng wāng. The two are the same word, read with each language's own sounds.

For the other animals, no dictionary we could find records a Shanghainese reading, so we do not guess one here. That is the general difficulty with Shanghainese: it looks like Mandarin on the page and is a different language aloud, which is set out in Shanghainese vs Mandarin.

Te reo Māori: words for what the animal does

Te Aka Māori Dictionary records Māori words for several animal sounds. Like Esperanto, Māori mostly names the action:

Te Aka's example for the duck is Kēkē kau ana te pārera, "the duck quacks", and for the pig, ka rangona ētahi poaka e ngengeri ana, "we heard some pigs grunting". It has no entry for a cat's miaow. The names of the animals themselves, kurī, ngeru, poaka, hipi and hōiho, are all in Verbavia's te reo Māori course, and more Māori for the classroom is in Māori for kids.

Why the same animal sounds different

A dog does not bark in Spanish. What differs is how each language turns a noise into a word.

Each language can only use its own sounds. An animal's call is not a speech sound at all, so every language approximates it with the consonants and vowels it already has. English has w and oo, so the dog says woof. Italian builds bau out of a b and an au. Māori has no b, d or g at all, so a Māori bark could never be bau or guau: the sounds are laid out in the Māori pronunciation guide.

Each language spells by its own rules. French writes the "w" sound as ou, which is why its dog says ouaf. German writes it with w but says it as v, so German wau wau is closer to "vow vow" aloud. Portuguese au au and Spanish guau may be closer in sound than they look.

Each language has its own word shapes. Mandarin syllables are short and end in a vowel or a nasal, which gives wāng. A word like cock-a-doodle-doo, with four syllables and stacked consonants, is a very English shape; Mandarin and Japanese would never build one.

Repetition is everywhere. Guau guau, wau wau, wāng wāng, coin coin: almost every language doubles its animal noises, because animals repeat.

The same thing that makes a dog's bark different makes a learner's accent: each of us hears new sounds through the sounds we already have. The words that are hard for that reason are counted in the hardest words to pronounce, and the words that are the same nearly everywhere in words that are the same in every language.

Learn the languages behind the sounds

Verbavia (our own course) teaches all nine of these languages from the most common words up, free on the web: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Mandarin, Esperanto, Shanghainese and te reo Māori.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Cross-linguistic onomatopoeias, the animal tables, for English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and Mandarin.
• Wiktionary: 汪汪 (Mandarin wāngwāng, Shanghainese uaon uaon); miaŭ, kokeriko, kvak, boji, miaŭi, muĝi, kvaki, heni, bleki and zumi (Esperanto).
• Te Aka Māori Dictionary: pahupahu, haru, kēkē, tekekō, ngengeri and hohō, with their example sentences.