Sounds All Around: A Guide to Onomatopoeias Around the World

by James Chapman

Overview

Did you know that in German, a pig doesn’t say oink, it says gruntz, and when you sneeze in Japanese it’s hakushon, not achoo? With vibrant comics and fun facts, Sounds All Around will teach you interesting and funny onomatopoeias from all over the world!

Words that imitate sounds are known as onomatopoeia, and they are a wonderfully strange and interesting part of language. After all, we all hear the same sounds, but we interpret and write them differently in different languages. Sounds All Around is a fun and funny illustrated guide to how people say many of these sounds all around the globe. Inside you’ll learn what a cat sounds like in French, what a yawn sounds like in Norwegian, what a bell sounds like in Hindi, and much, much more!
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524850760
Publisher:	Andrews McMeel Publishing
Publication date:	08/25/2020
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	680L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Dr. James Chapman is an illustrator and writer who has always been interested in language. His webcomic series, Soundimals, which explored the sounds animals make in different languages around the world, inspired this book. He lives in Manchester, UK.
 

Editorial Reviews

2020-03-29
This graphic survey of onomatopoeias takes on a global demographic of sounds.

The narrator is a smiling, golden star that appears on every page, introducing readers to an individual sound as it is expressed in different languages. Each chapter represents a category of sounds, starting with animal sounds, then moving on to loud noises and sounds the human body makes, before ending with the expressive sounds of emotions. Refreshingly, the survey ventures beyond Western European languages, including Malay, Latvian, Punjabi, Telugu, and Filipino, among others. Languages that do not use the Roman alphabet are transliterated, so an Arabic lion says, “zayiyr”; when bubbles pop in Russia they go, “chpok!”; and a Korean clock goes, “ddok ddak.” Though it’s easy to see how children can have fun mimicking the sounds expressed in the speech bubbles that dot the colorful cartoon illustrations, there is no appreciable education about the cultures represented. Some pages feature illustrations of human characters of various skin colors. While, admirably, there seems to be no racial correspondence of skin color to language, the narrator makes some jokes that fall flat, as when it declares its preference for classical music when a Danish duck says “rap,” or seems to make fun of Korean screams. There is no map to locate languages geographically for readers.

This survey of languages is fun but superficial. (Graphic nonfiction. 8-12)

Kirkus Reviews