What does this sound like to you: Splat! KruuuuunNCH! Ker-bang! POW!? Is it Spiderman sorting out his enemies in the new Hollywood blockbuster? Or is it the sound of comic-book English duffing up the less muscular languages of the comic-book world?

According to some linguists and phonologists, the comic-book onomatopoeias of English, all those Ba-doingggs, Oooofs and Grrrrrs — used to amplify thought, action and speech in comic strips — are supplanting the native sound-words used in the comics of smaller languages: and altering these languages at root.

This may seem counterintuitive. Surely onomatopoeias are the same the world over? No. Some sound-words are different simply because of the alternative pronunciation of letters: hee hee hee in English is ji ji ji in Spanish; Swedish cars don’t toot, they tut. Other differences are more subtle, and traditional. The cat’s miaow in English is nyao in Japanese. Someone drinking wine in French makes a glou-glou sound, rather like our glug-glug. French steam trains go tchou-tchou; the Swedish for splash! is plaska!; and Korean cuckoos go ppu-kookk ppu-kookk.

Many onomatopoeias vary strongly or simply have no foreign equivalents. French guns go papop! Danish ambulance sirens go barbu-barbu. Chinese bees don’t buzz, they weng; Swedish cockroaches make a cackerlacka noise; Burmese saxophones go eBa. In Japan the first raindrops in a storm go potsun-potsun; a rich head of hair makes a fusa-fusa noise; and poka-poka is the “sound” something makes when it is nice and warm (think of the bling of our garish jewellery).

It other words it’s a wonderful world of variation. So how and why is English taking over? The first reason is that the most internationally successful comic books are written in English. Whether you’re talking Peanuts, Garfield or the Marvel superheroes, or the new British strips like Tank Girl and Judge Dredd, modern anglophone comics are global phenomena. Germany alone translates 40,000 pages of comic books every year: mostly from English. Countries with stronger native comic-book traditions — France, for instance — are more resistant to the takeover; they are definitely the exception.

The problem is that many of the onomatopoeias within the comic books are usually left untranslated. Viktor Janis, who makes over British graphic novels into Czech, explains: “When you are translating comics, you have to almost count the letters in your sentences because everything has got to fit in the bubble.”

And there’s the rub. In comic books, translations of the characters’ words have to fit in the speech bubbles, which makes the job costly and time-consuming, leaving little time or money for tasks such as translating any Ker-plunks! or Creeeeeks! printed outside the speech bubble.

Michaela Schnetzer, a Swiss translator with a special interest in comic books, explains: “Words like boom and bang are now common in German comics translated from English, even though, when pronounced in German, they do not correspond to the sounds they represent; the German equivalents would be bum and pang. But the prevalance of boom and bang means that German readers are now accustomed to reading the English onomatopoeias.”

A second problem is that the equivalent onomatopoeias in the native tongue may not fit the overall cartoon frame. If Judge Dredd drives his Lawmaster bike into Judge Death with a triumphant Ker-rash!, the foreign translator of this Ker-rash! may look for the best equivalent in his own language and find that it is nine letters long. These letters might not squeeze into the frame. Result: the poor time-pressed hack opts for the original sound-word, unchanged. And so the Lawmaster bike of global English rides roughshod over the local lingo, again.

There are further difficulties. As we have established, there may not even be a local sound-word equivalent, especially if you are translating from a flexible and fecund language like English, which is rich in onomatopoeias. Eva Martina Fuentes, a Spanish linguist, says: “A 1979 survey, El Lenguaje de los Comics, showed that English sound-words outnumbered Spanish, for example, by about two to one.”

And the result of all this? As Fuentes puts it: “Many sounds that should seem strange to non-English speakers have been adopted and even naturalised. Today we see English words in any Spanish comic, even if the comic is not a translation but a Spanish original. And this internationalisation of English onomatopoeia has occurred to varying degrees throughout the West.”

All this may seem trivial. So what if cowboy-playing kids in Vienna are shouting bang! instead of pang!? So what if money-making teens in Malaysia say a gleeful ker-ching! rather than their own equivalent? The problem is that some of the world’s languages are just as rich in their own sound-words as English: it would be a shame if this treasure of sound-words is lost.

A good case is the East Asian languages, particularly Japanese. This language has a wealth of onomatopoeias, which are the bane of English translators trying to turn all those manga and anime comics into English. From the doki-doki of Japanese lovers’ heartbeats to the heta! of the exhausted Japanese housewife, from the iku-iku of someone nearing orgasm to the gwahaha of a Japanese villain’s laugh to the gocha-gocha of nagging in nearby Tokyo apartments, the Japanese tongue outpaces even the most caffeinated Marvel comics writer with its onomatopoeic inventiveness.

Japanese is one of the few languages so far largely uncolonised by Anglo-American sound-words. Maybe Spiderman will one day meet his match in Godzilla.