Oink

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"Oink" is the usual way that the grunting of a pig is represented in the English language. As with other examples of onomatopoeia or imitative sounds, other cultures "hear" the pig's grunts differently and represent them in their own ways. Some of the equivalents of "oink" in other European and Asian languages are as follows:

Afrikaans - snork
Albanian - hunk
Bengali - ghɲt ghɲt (ghot, with 'o' as in 'oar', but with a nasal inflection)
Bulgarian - грух (gruh), квик (kvik)
Catalan - onk
Chinese:
* Cantonese Chinese - god
* Mandarin Chinese - hulu
* Min Nan - kōⁿ
Croatian - rok
Czech - chro
Danish - øf
Dutch - knor
Esperanto - grunt
Estonian - röhh, rui
Finnish - röh, nöf
French - grouïk or grui
German - grunz or oink oink
Greek - γρου γρου
Hungarian - röf
Japanese - buu
Korean - 꿀꿀 (kkul-kkul) [ɡ̬ulɡ̬ul]
Latvian - ruk
Lithuanian - kriu kriu
Norwegian - nøff
Polish - chrum, kwik
Romanian - groh, guiţ
Russian - хрю (khryu)
Serbian - grok
Slovak - kroch, kvik
Spanish - oing or oinq
Swedish - nöff
Thai - ood
Ukrainian - хру (khru)
Welsh - soch

Note the similarities between the renderings in related languages, such as röh, röhh and röf in Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, respectively, or chrum and khryu in Polish and Russian. This reflects shared linguistic heritages – Finno-Ugric and Slavic respectively, for the examples quoted above – and suggests an old origin for many of the renderings. However, the English word "oink" is fairly recent. The earliest use cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1969 although such words often have an older, unrecorded history. Grunt, relating specifically to the sound a pig makes, goes as far back as the 700s CE. Spanish could use much the same representation as English, rendering it as "¡oink!" ("oinq" using more popular writing form), but it usually suffer sound-translation becoming "oing" make the sound larger and wetter. This may be a borrowing from English.

Oink

See also