Nuts and Bolts: doggish.

A universal language would be useful, wouldn't it? Various languages at various times have come some way towards performing this function. Currently it happens to be the turn of English to be very widely used. 

But there's at least one language that really is universal all over the world - and the only problem is that it's spoken by dogs. 

Yes, a Turkish dog will understand a Latvian dog, who will understand a Brazilian dog, who will understand an Indian dog.

Back off! Hello-hello-hello! I'm completely harmless.

But our human languages aren't so versatile. English dogs, for instance, say woof-woof! or sometimes bow-wow (or so English people say) but although these beliefs do have some wider support among other languages they're not in complete agreement. Welsh people's dogs, for example, go wff wff, French ones wouf wouf, and Afrikaans ones woef-woef. The bow-wow sound is recognised even more widely, from India (bow-bow), Hungary (vow-vow), Lebanon (how-how), China (wow-wow) to Malaysia (ow-ow).

On the other hand in Israel dogs say hav-hav, in Albania ham-ham (which is understandable), in Burma woke-woke, and in Indonesia guk-guk.

But the dogs? They understand it all. 

Even, mysteriously, when the message is sprayed on a lamp-post.

Thing To Do Today: try to hear a dog say guk-guk, perhaps.

A really thorough and excellent article on this topic has been written by Stanley Coren and can be found HERE.