Talking to pets, specifically your cat, in Japanese? (Bear with me)

I can’t seem to find any info on this searching around. Kind of a silly question but since resources are hard to find I thought perhaps this might be worth a thread. I was wondering if some of these phrases would make sense talking to my cat, but also for native speakers are there any phrases they use talking to their cats?

My cats name is Mai. She’s pretty old now so over the years the stuff I say is pretty established. “Who’s a good kitty” “who’s a cute kitty”, “who’s a fluffy cat”, but also substituting her name for cat or kitty with the most basic being “who’s a Mai”. “Who’s” also being interchangeable with “are you” (“are you a cute cat”). And then apart from that format, things like “who’s got meows” or “who’s got purrs”. So, curious how these would translate I tried putting some things together in my very beginner way.

ふわふわですか was what I could come up with, for “who’s fluffy” but I think I ended up with “are you fluffy”. Would I completely drop the “who” like this or instead say ふわふわはだれ  since the first might just be “are you fluffy”? And then to add a little, かわいい猫ですか vs. かわいい猫はだれ ? I assume maybe completely dropping あなたわ and sometimes ですか is ok in this usage sometimes, talking to an animal?

As for “who’s a Mai”, this kind of already is “wrong” in English. Is there a way to do this in Japanese or is it too nonsensical to say something like 麻衣はだれ?

A couple others that I couldn’t really put together myself, “who’s got meows” – would だれがニアーおもっていますか work? “I had no idea how to even approach “who’s got purrs”.

And then the last part, does anyone know what native “cat speak” is, some examples or places I could find some? Feel free to ignore all of the above if you’d like since this is the more universal topic.

Again sorry for the oddity of all of this but now I’m really curious beyond the initial translation question, which I was just going to put into the daily questions thread, and wondering about pet talk for Japanese speakers.

3 comments
  1. Maybe you could say “ふわふわね”? No need for the backlash I might get but can’t help much since writing/speaking isn’t one of my goals. Although I do hope it could help come up with something and make this a learning experience for both of us.

  2. [にゃんテレNews](https://youtube.com/channel/UCZGpkEJMZOlmMpWQ12Okq7Q) is devoted to cats, and you might find some examples of owners talking to cats on there (or on the million other Japanese cat videos YouTube will recommend once you watch those). You could also look for examples in TV shows like Chi’s Sweet Home or With a Dog and a Cat, Every Day is Fun.

  3. I say to my cat なんでこんなにふわふわなの?(why’re you so fluffy?) to my cat (she’s a native Japanese citizen) all the time. No complaints from her so far.

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