The Surprisingly Non-Universal Nature of Onomatopoeias

If you are like me, you have gone your whole life assuming that animals make the same noises in every country. Oh, how wrong we were. Believe it or not, this phenomenon has a name. And a Wikipedia article. What we are dealing with is cross-linguistic onomatopoeia. What that really means is that whereas our ducks might quack-quack, a Danish duck be all like "rap-rap". Ya heard? I know, what a trippy idea. Being that onomatopoeias are based upon the written equivalent of the sounds things make, you would think that they would be a fairly universal thing. Let's take a look at some notable examples of cross-linguistic onomatopoeia.

Albanian babies exclaim: "ua-ua"

A German cartoon in which someone bites into something would have a sound expressive bubble that says "mampf"

Dutch cows "boe" rather than "moo"

Norwegian dogs "voff voff" when the mailman approaches

Hungarian frogs serenade from the lilly pads with "brekeke"

Filipino roosters sound a proud "tiktilaok" at the rise of the sun

Read more about cross-linguistic onomatopoeia here.