Review of Sounds All Around: A Guide to Onomatopoeias Around the World by Dr. James Chapman

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!

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**My thoughts**

Ever since I was a young child, I have always been fascinated by other languages. We learned both French and Spanish at school and I had an aunt from Costa Rica. So they were all around me. I remember thinking it was funny how animals supposedly said different words in other countries. That was when I first learned about onomatopeia, which is what this book is all about.

It's a fun trek around the world to learn how the same sound is interpreted differently in a ton of different languages, with some fun animal facts thrown in. (And did you know that Old MacDonald actually has different names around the world as well?) Their sounds are given in word bubbles next to cute cartoon pictures of each animal. The language is listed underneath. I read a lot of these words using English phonics. It would be nice to have a pronunciation guide to make sure we are saying them correctly, though I did appreciate seeing how these words are spelled in the different languages and alphabets. And I had a major issue with the languages being listed underneath the words and NOT capitalized. That's grammatically incorrect and could lead to kids forgetting to capitalize their languages when writing. The teacher in me was twitching with that part.

The book continues past the animals with other sound words that we encounter in our world, like creaking, knocking, bells ringing, weather, and more. There's also a little bit of history about the theories behind how the different sounds are reproduced in the various languages. It was highly interesting!

Thank you to the publisher for fulfilling my review request via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.