From the map:
Cats may be highly independent creatures, but their language is quite similar throughout the world.
The majority of cat sounds begin with an ‘m,’ including the familiar Meow (Australia, Kenya and Micronesia, to name but a few).
There’s Miau in Nicaragua, Myaco in Nepal, and Miu Miu in Bangladesh.
True to form, however, some felines will just do their own thing, including those in North and South Korea (Yaong) and Malaysia (Ngiau).
Top 5 Most Common Cat Sounds:
- Miau / Miauw: 38 countries
- Meow: 22 countries
- Muwaa: 20 countries
- Miaou: 9 countries
- Mjau: 5 countries
Here are the sounds in various languages around the world according to Language Pro.
- Afrikaans: miaau
- Albanian: mjau
- Arabic (Algeria): miaou miaou
- Bengali: meu-meu
- Catalan: meu, meu
- Chinese (Mandarin): miao miao
- Croatian: mijau
- Danish: mjav
- Dutch: miauw
- English: meow
- Esperanto: miaw
- Estonian: näu
- Finnish: miau, kurnau
- French: miaou
- German: miau
- Greek: niaou
- Hebrew: miyau
- Hindi: mya:u, mya:u:
- Hungarian: miau
- Icelandic: mjá
- Indonesian: ngeong
- Italian: miao
- Japanese: nyaa
- Korean: (n)ya-ong
- Norwegian: mjau
- Polish: miau
- Portuguese: miau
- Russian: myau
- Slovene: mijau
- Spanish (Spain, Argentina): miau
- Swedish: mjau
- Thai: meow meow (with high tone)
- Turkish: miyauv, miyauv
- Ukrainian: myau
- Vietnamese: meo-meo
Also see: Dog Bark Sounds: How Different Countries & Languages Represent Dog Sounds in Words
How do you say it?
Pinpoint Answer says
It is fascinating to see how onomatopoeia for cat sounds varies across different languages while still retaining the core nasal ‘m’ sound in most cultures. The comparison between European languages and East Asian ones like Japanese and Korean is particularly interesting to see mapped out!
dialed-gg says
It is remarkable how consistently the initial ‘m’ sound appears in cat onomatopoeias worldwide, reflecting how human phonetics naturally interprets feline vocalizations.