this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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Fun! Source article also covers meows.
How did they get it so wrong? "Mjan" doesn't even exist in Swedish, it should be mjau.
Interesting how the cat sound is almost the same in most languages, but the dog sound varies a lot
Thank you!
Good find! Thanks
How is voff so much different than woof? It's pronounced like exactly the same.
woef and miauw in Dutch
French is "ouah ouah".
German can be "wuff wuff" or "wau wau".
I doubt the rest is correct
Finnish is "hau hau"
This doesn’t make much sense because it purely looks at spelling, and not at pronunciation. We use ‘woef’ in Dutch as well, which is pronounced like, and probably has a common origin with, German ‘wuff’ and English ‘woof’.
French ‘ouaf’ is also pronounced essentially the same as Dutch ‘waf’, likely also not by accident.
This map is pretty much meaningless.
Is must have been really hard to make that chart. Imagine listening to lots of dogs from different places
And just like that I remembered about the Arbitrary Nature of Linguistic Sign I read about 20 years ago.
How, how?
Turns out they bark the same.
The one for the Netherlands is wrong: dogs say "blaf blaf" here, not "waf waf."
Probably also depends on where in the Netherlands you are. Rarely hear anyone say "Blaf!" I thought "Woef!" would be the most common.
Well, they say the city I live in has the most neutral of all Dutch accents... therefore, so do our dogs!