What do animals sound like in different languages?

[Ser]

Dogs ladran and cats maúllan.* Or dicen "guau" and dicen "miau", respectively.

[Izambri]

Catalan: Viquipèdia

[Solarius]

Alveolar click here too.

[Nortaneous]

dental clicks are for calling squirrels

[Particles the Greek]

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but has anyone ever tried to come up with actual accurate phonetic descriptions of animal noises? There's a research grant in there somewhere!

[gach]

Describing the phonetics of general animal vocalisations accurately will need quite a sizeable extension to any phonetic notation system developed for describing sounds created by the human mouth. It's much more valuable to stick to acoustic descriptions and extract meaningful "phonemes" or recurring phrases from them for each species that's studies.

Still, open pretty much any bird guide and you should find crude guidelines for identifying the songs of most if not all of the of the included birds. These are just not very accurate and mostly good for excluding possible candidates when identifying a bird you've seen. I've never heard any bird vocalise stuff like [pjyi]. Naturally this kind of representations also have to be very dependent of the language the books are written in.

[DTheZombie]

http://www.bzzzpeek.com/index.html has a bunch of sound files of kids from all over the world pronouncing their local animal/vehicle/cuckoo-clock (strangely and sadly thats all) onomatopoeia. Interesting nonetheless.

In the UK at least, people call cats in various different ways. They usually understand if you want to attract them, its the tone of voice that attracts them not the words.

That's exactly what I was thinking about American cats as well.

They'll at least look up to "ks ks" in Iceland. In America, not at all.

If "ks,ks" is pronounced /ksks/, this makes sense if American cats are attracted more to the tone of voice as these are voiceless. Also, (at least where I'm from in America but I'm pretty sure its a "general" thing in England too) we tend to use the sharp sibilants to shoo animals away (as evidenced by the onomatopoeic verb "to shoo") so the "ks, ks"ing may be having the opposite effect from what you want. Just a thought.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-ling ... matopoeias