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- This article is about the noise. For other uses, see Oink (disambiguation).
"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 - grouik or grui
- German - grunz or oink oink
- Greek - γρου γρου
- Hungarian - röf
- Japanese - buu
- Korean - 꿀꿀 (kkul-kkul) [ɡ̬ulɡ̬ul]
- Latvian - ruk or urkš urkš
- Lithuanian - kriu kriu
- Norwegian - nøff
- Polish - chrum, kwik
- Portuguese - óinc
- Romanian - groh, guiţ
- Russian - хрю (hryu)
- Serbian - grok
- Slovak - kroch, kvik
- Spanish - oing or oinc
- Swedish - nöff
- Thai - ood
- Ukrainian - хру (hru)
- 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 suffers sound-translation becoming "oing" make the sound larger and wetter. This may be a borrowing from English.
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