Derek Abbott, a physicist and electronic engineer at the University of Adelaide in Australia, has compiled one of the largest collections of animal sounds, which he’s put together in a table that you can see here.

Abbott said he hasn’t found formal research that addresses this specific topic, and he speculated that “the academic world simply overlooked what was thought to be children’s talk.” But, he continued, “it is loaded with a gold mine of cultural, scientific, and linguistic questions, so definitely deserves study.”

There’s been surprisingly little academic research on this [Update: Or so I thought! After this post was first published, several linguists reached out to let me know that, in fact, there’s been a whole lot of study of onomatopoeia, some of which touches on animal sounds. Read on for input from one of them, Princeton University linguist Byron Ahn].