Reader Erica netmail to say,“I heard on Twitter , from one of those’amazing facts’accounts , that cows low in regional accent . Is that true ? ”
It ’s severely not to love the idea of cows moo differently around the world . I very much want this to be truthful , and if you Google “ moo-cow accents , ” you might think it is . The BBC says it . NPR says it . Pretty much every major paper in the UK says it . alas , the answer is closer to “ Maybe ? Nobody roll in the hay . ”
Most of the story that say , “ yeah , cows have accents ” came out at around the same sentence in 2006 , and many of them relied on two source : anecdotic reports from British dairy Fannie Merritt Farmer , and John Wells , a Professor of Phonetics at University College London .
According to Wells , though , most of the reinforcement he seemingly leave for the idea in these stories is really a “ selective and garbled translation of what I had said . ”
Heexplainedto the University of Pennsylvania ’s Language Log blog around the time the stories start pop up that a wad of his quotes were really the inventions of a public telling house .
“ They had been engaged by a cheeseflower manufacturer , West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers , to air their regional varieties of cheeseflower , ” Wells told Language enter an email . “ They telephone me to ask whether there was any possibility that cows ' moos might motley geographically . I tell them I thought it extremely unlikely ; but that there was well established scientific evidence that several mintage of bird exhibit regional variance in their calls , so you could not entirely rule out the possibility .
“ Cows , of class , do not in oecumenical form stable sequestrate population such as would presumably be necessary to allow such regional diversity to develop , ” he continued . “ On the contrary , cattle are bought and sell and trucked around the country and indeed internationally . ”
Wells ’ “ possibly , but belike not ” was spun into a “ yes ” in many floor , and things only got further out of command from there . Some coverage take that Wells and/or other researchers had sustain the farmers ’ observation with a study of moo-cow vocalizations . If such a study was impart , though , no one seems to have wanted mass to read it . While there are scientific newspaper on moos as indicators of a cow ’s “ physiological and psychological performance ” and generative position , there does n’t appear to be any published research on geographical variations in moo .
