To work out what the various sounds mean, the team will be recording up to 50 cats in different locations to see how their mood affects their meowing when they are content, friendly, happy, hungry, annoyed or even angry – and try to identify any differences in their phonetic patterns.  “It seems that cats can vary the intonation or melody consciously, perhaps to convey a certain message or increase the urgency of a message or to convey emotion,” said lead researcher Susanne Schötz, a reader in phonetics.  “I have found with my cats they have a different sound in their melody when they are sad compared to when they are happy.  The team at Lund is hoping to not only translate what cats are saying, but help owners communicate better with their pets. Researchers will be monitoring how humans speak to their pets to find out which are the most successful.  “For example, we want to know if cats prefer pet–directed speech or prefer to be spoken to like human adults,” added Dr Schotz.  “We still have much to learn about how cats perceive human speech. We will be doing some listening tests to see which they prefer. Do they prefer children’s voices to adults? We don’t know.”  Last year Dr Sharon Crowell-Davis, a professor of veterinary behavior at the University of Georgia, claimed to have cracked the code of cat language.  She claimed that purring, far from indicating contentedness, was actually a plea from the animal saying ‘don’t go anywhere please’ and was often used when the cat was ill.  Likewise, when cats rub up against your legs they are giving you a feline hug, indicating you are part of their group, and welcoming you home. It is the cat way of saying ‘ you’re back, I missed you.’  Researchers in the new study are also working with a Linkoping University to see if cats in Lund and Stockholm have different accents and dialects.  Dr Schotz added: “We want to find out to what extent domestic cats are influenced by the language and dialect that humans use to speak to them, because it seems that cats use slightly different dialects in the sounds they produce.”
The language of cats could be decoded in just a few years, after scientists   launched project to translate feline sounds