Culture

People Are Seriously Convinced That Their Cats Are Speaking English

If y'all were tricked by "NASA" into making your brooms stand up then this is not at all surprising.

by Michelle Rennex  12 February 2020
cats talking in english

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It seems like every few months someone comes out with an unintelligible video of their cat “speaking” English.

And to be honest, most of these clips are usually a huge stretch because, let’s face it. As much as people love to think it, cats just aren’t capable of having conversations in full sentences as much as we want it to be true.

But while sentences are out of the question, people seem to think cats are at least able to communicate through single human-like words. The conversation started when Twitter user @diegheaux shared a TikTok of a cat seemingly saying the words “hello” and “hi”.

The cat in the video calls out “hello” while looking for his owner, then changes sounds and switches to the word “hi” when he finally finds her. Honestly, the words sound pretty clear and the case is actually kinda convincing.

In just a few days, the tweet was liked over 400,000 times and inspired people to share similar “talking cat” videos. While some were more convincing than others, the clarity of the words coming from the cats were pretty spot on.

The feline sounds very closely resembled the English words “hello”, “I’m cold” and “well, hi!” Even more surprising, one cat even sounded like it asked the question “are you coming?” to his owner. This particular video went viral on TikTok earlier this week, where the catch amassed over 2.3 million likes on the video sharing platform.

Following these videos making their way online, people were soon convinced that emergence of so many talking cat videos meant that perhaps felines could actually speak English.

However, while we wish it were the case, science says otherwise. Susanne Schötz, a linguistics researcher from Lund University in Sweden, claims that while cats can imitate human voices, it’s more about the sound than it is diction.

“Cats can imitate nuances in their owners’ voices, such as melody patterns, in order to be able to communicate better,” Schötz explained. Providing a real-world example, Schötz described the difference in a cats melodic meow “which ends in an upward note” while sitting near their food bowl to a “more monotonous [meow that] goes down at the end” heard as a cat sits in a cage at the vet.

Moreover, cats don’t have the same vocal cords or mouth shape as us, meaning they simply cannot speak like humans. So while these cats sound like they’re talking to us, it’s just our optimism turning these miscellaneous sounds into words that sound familiar to us.

Update: 12/02/20

Junkee reached out Ashely Ward, a Professor of Animal Behaviour from the University of Sydney, to provide further insight into why people are hearing their cats speak. “Cats have rather different structures in their vocal tract compared to us and these prevent them from closely mimicking human words or voices,” Professor Ward explained.

“We are predisposed to identify things that sound like words and load those with meaning [but] from the cat’s point of view, it gets a positive response by making that specific sound, so continues to do it,” Professor Ward continued. “The cat’s communicating, but not talking.”