BIDEFORD, England — Everyone knows about the Southern drawl. Now, dairy farmers in southwestern England claim their cows are mooing with a regional accent.
"We believe our cows make a different sort of a mooing noise than the cows further up the country," said David Willes at Parkham Farms here.
The farmers say their cows emit more of a "moo-arr" than just a plain "moo."
He is one of 13 members of the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, a group popular for their cheddar and other cheeses made by hand without any additives.
The group is well known across Britain for spending hours pampering their cows. They play classical music to help the cows relax while they are being milked, and cover them with coats in the winter.
"I spend a lot of time with my Friesians, and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl," said Lloyd Green, a dairy farmer in Glastonbury, England, located in the bucolic borough of Somerset. "I've spoken to the other farmers in the group and they have noticed a similar development in their own herds.
Green and other members of the group have listened to recordings of cows from other regions and have noted similar shifts in Midlands, Essex, Norfolk, and Lancashire moos.
Phonetics experts say the claims aren't as outlandish as they might sound.
"There could be some regional variation in the sounds made by different animals," said Jeanine Treffers-Daller, reader in linguistics at the University of the West of England in Bristol. "We know most about the variation in birds, but hardly any research has been done into other species."
Studies in the United States and elsewhere have found a similar phenomenon in birds from different regions.
Donna Maney, an assistant professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, said some types of birds have the ability to mimic sounds, an ability called "vocal learning."
"Most people are familiar with the vocal learning abilities of parrots, but two other groups of birds with vocal learning abilities are hummingbirds and songbirds," she said.
Maney said that songbird species do have "dialects" that vary according to geography.
"White-crowned sparrows in Marin County, California, sing a different dialect than those in Berkeley, California," she said. "Those dialects have been intensely studied."
She said, however, that this is generally not because of interaction with humans, but because populations are isolated from each other.
According to Eugene McCarthy, a geneticist at the University of Georgia in Athens, a phenomenon known as "imprinting," which exists in both birds and mammals, can have effects similar to those described by the British dairy farmers.
"Imprinting occurs in animals that provide parental care for their offspring," he said. "Most birds, for example, will readily imprint on whatever bird they raise."
But McCarthy said he would be surprised if farmers' voices were directly affecting their cattle's accents.
"It seems more likely that there would be regional variations independent of farmers' accents," he said, "and probably also variations in the breeds that might correlate with the variations in those sounds."
"Many birds differ in call from one region to another, and this is true specifically of birds in the southern and northern U.S.," McCarthy said. "For example, mockingbirds sing less in the north than they do here (in the South) and they sing different songs, mainly because they are imitating different birds."