What Does the Frog Say?

Ask any English-speaking toddler and they’ll tell you frogs say “ribbit.” Ask a baby in China and you’ll get a very different answer, “guo guo.” In Japan, frogs say “kero kero.” And in Germany? “Kwaak.”

How is it that so many different languages interpret (ostensibly) the same sound differently? Animal sounds are onomatopoeia — words that sound like what they describe, such as buzz or zoom or thud. So why do different languages recreate the same sounds in different ways?

The immediate explanation lies in the morphemes inherent to every language. Japanese and Chinese, for example, do not have the “v” sound, and thus no Chinese speaker will interpret a frog’s croak as “vrak,” the way a German speaker does. This raises an interesting Whorfian question: does the phonemic repertoire or linguistic quirks of a language influence how we perceive sound? The phonemes available to a group of speakers may alter the way they perceive a sound ever so slightly, such as variations in the allophones speakers are trained to distinguish between (such as /t/ and /th/ in Thai) or sensitivity to pitch (such as in Chinese and Vietnamese).

Culturally taught expectations may also play a critical role. Imagine if you had never heard a frog before, but had been told that they say “ribbit.” The first time you hear a frog, would you be more likely to hear the sound as something resembling a ribbit? In this case, culture could very well influence your expectations, rather than strictly the language itself.

These small cultural variations — plus the different phonemic repertoires among speakers and emphasis on different distinctions (such as attention to pitch in Chinese and Vietnamese) — all may culminate in ever so slightly changing the way we hear frogs. But, do animal sounds prove the Whorfian hypothesis? In my opinion, not quite, since our description of sound is too tied up in language to ever really know if we hear the same way. (Just as we may never know if I see the same color red the same way that you do.) But the question of onomatopoeia could be an interesting introduction into how language shapes the sounds we hear, and how those sounds shape language right back.

Image Credit: James Chapman (chapmangamd.tumblr.com)