Do you ever wonder if the reason that different cultures have such wildly different onomatopoeias for the noise a cat makes is that cats have regional accents?
Actually, they do.
There’s a lot of evidence that animals have regional accents. Both birds and sperm whales in fact to vocalise differently depending on where they grew up.
As for felines themselves, there’s an ongoing study underway on at Lund University precisely about this.
As a phonologist who has watched entirely too many cat videos on the internet, I can confirm that cats of differing countries do have differentiated accents in their cries. Felines in England tend to have shorter, lower “mow” whereas Japanese cats do tend to make glides into high vowels, and are sustained longer, such as the ubiqutous use of “nyaaaan” in Japanese onomatopoeia.
As a linguist, I can affirm that the sounds produced for communication are determined every bit as much by anatomical features as they are by communicative experience.
Has anyone ever taken a look at cats’ body sizes and shapes, especially in the face and throat? Especially the width of the throat, the length of the nose, depth of the chest, and size of the jaws and mouth.
Look at all these face, chest, and throat shapes. That alone would indicate differences in their sounds.
What I really want to see is comparing maine coons bred in different countries and raised by litters from different regions being compared, or cats with the same size/shape (to cover anatomical inconsistencies) being compared, even across a continent.
But the tricky thing is, even cats from the same place have different voices and preferred “syllables” they’ll sustain, or how rapidly they call, or for how long.
Does anyone know who that study (re: cat accents) is being conducted by? I can’t find any mentions of that one, specifically… (All the Google results I’m getting are about what certain cat noises mean, or the big debate on ‘do cats have a special language for humans/dogs/other cats’, ‘what noises do cats make we can’t hear’, etc… I can’t find a study or article on the accent thing.)
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