December 11, 2025, 3:44 pm | Read time: 6 minutes
What does a cat’s purring say about it? More than many think. A study reveals surprising insights into the vocal communication of cats. While meowing varies greatly from situation to situation, purring is much more stable—and reveals a lot about each cat’s individual identity.
Purring as an Acoustic Fingerprint
A research team led by Danilo Russo (University of Naples), Anja Birgit Schild (Free University of Berlin), and Mirjam Knörnschild (Museum of Natural History Berlin & HU Berlin) examined how strongly individual characteristics are recognizable in two central sounds of domestic cats—meowing and purring. The results were published in 2025 in the journal “Scientific Reports.”
The researchers analyzed over 800 vocalizations from domestic cats and compared the meowing with sounds from five wildcat species. The goal was to determine how domestication and human-cat interaction have influenced vocal diversity—with astonishing results.
Meowing as a Human-Oriented Signal
Individual recognizability through voice plays an important role in the animal world, such as for social bonds, cooperation, or recognizing conspecifics. While it is known that many animal species have vocal “signatures,” it has hardly been researched whether these are differently pronounced depending on the type of sound.
This becomes particularly interesting with pets like the cat (Felis catus), whose vocal behavior has significantly changed due to proximity to humans. This mainly affects meowing as a human-oriented signal, which plays little role in the wild. The researchers, therefore, suspected that meowing might contain particularly many pieces of information about the cat’s identity. But as it turned out, the opposite is true. While the meowing of domestic cats varies greatly in form, a cat’s purring remains stable. Thus, it provides much more reliable clues about the cat’s identity, with far-reaching implications for our understanding of pet communication.
Researchers Analyzed Hundreds of Meow and Purr Sounds
They examined 276 meow sounds from 14 domestic cats and 557 purr sounds from 21 domestic cats. All animals lived in private households or animal shelters in Berlin and were recorded in everyday situations—such as waiting for food (meowing) or being petted (purring).
Additionally, the team analyzed 185 meow sounds from five wildcat species: African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), European wildcat, jungle cat, cheetah, and puma. All these species belong to the family of small cats (Felinae), which, unlike big cats (Pantherinae), can meow and—except for the puma—can also purr continuously.
The research team used automatic speech recognition technologies and recordings from the animal sound archive at the Berlin Museum of Natural History to examine various vocalizations. Through highly precise methods (including the so-called “mel-frequency cepstral coefficients”—MFCC), individual differences in sound structure were captured. The study was purely observational and met all ethical requirements.
Domestication Makes Meowing More Diverse
It was found that both meow and purr sounds contained recognizable individual characteristics, but purring showed significantly stronger identity signatures. In the automatic assignment to the correct cats, the hit rate for purring was 84.6 percent—compared to only 63.2 percent for meowing.
The so-called “Stereotypy Index” (HS) showed that purring can convey information about up to 22 individuals, whereas meowing only about six. Both meow and purr sounds contained recognizable individual characteristics.
“People mainly pay attention to meowing because cats primarily use these sounds towards us,” explains lead author Danilo Russo in a press release. “But after we closely examined the acoustic structure, the consistent purring turned out to be the better means of identifying different individuals.”
Every Cat Has a Characteristic Purr
The technologies used by the team were originally developed for the automatic recognition of human speech. And yet a computer could reliably identify the respective cat and its sounds based solely on the sound.
“Every cat in our study had its own characteristic purr,” says co-author Anja Schild. “Purring often occurs in relaxed situations, such as when being petted or in close contact with a familiar person. It is also used for communication between a mother cat and her kittens shortly after birth. Meowing, on the other hand, is known for its versatility.”
Cats use their meowing particularly in interaction with humans—such as when begging for food, demanding attention, or expressing dissatisfaction. This situational diversity was also reflected in the acoustic patterns. Within an individual, meows show significantly greater differences than purr sounds.
Why Do Some Cats Purr More Than Others? Study Finds the Reason
Does My Cat Understand Me When I Meow at Her?
Domestication Promotes Vocal Adaptability
To place these results in an evolutionary context, the researchers then compared the vocalizations of the five wildcat species with those of domestic cats. The recordings from the museum’s extensive animal sound archive showed: The meows of domestic cats were significantly more variable than those of their wild relatives.
“Living with humans, who differ greatly in routines, expectations, and reactions, has likely favored cats that could flexibly adapt their meows. Our results support the idea that meows have evolved into a highly adaptable tool to negotiate life in a human-influenced world,” says senior author Mirjam Knörnschild.
Thus, the study illustrates how the vocal communication of cats has changed through domestication. While the stereotypical, low-frequency purring functions as a reliable recognition feature and is generated rather subconsciously, cats actively use the varied meowing to flexibly respond to different situations in complex human-animal communication.
Two Sounds, Two Functions
The study provides new insights into the complex vocal language of cats. It suggests that domestication has primarily promoted the flexibility of meowing. While the deeper, rhythmic purring serves as a stable characteristic of the individual, enabling recognition in close social environments, meowing serves as a communication tool to express individual needs and emotions towards humans.
For the first time, there is also a direct comparison between the two most important vocalizations of domestic cats in terms of individual recognizability. The results refute the assumption that meowing intended for humans in particular would carry many identity features. This could be because purring is largely determined by anatomical features of the vocal apparatus.
Meowing, on the other hand, is strongly influenced by situation, emotion, and learning processes. Especially with human caregivers, cats seem to actively modulate their meowing—depending on the reaction they want to elicit. The wide range of meowing in domestic cats shows how much this vocalization has changed through living with us. Humans seem to have unconsciously influenced the development of these sounds through breeding and interaction.