Researchers led from Germany's Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Italy's University of Naples Federico II determined that meowing has evolved into a flexible, "all-purpose signal" used by pet cats to communicate with people.
In contrast, purring -- typically either a show of contentment, or a means to self-soothe -- was found by the team to be a more consistent and reliable indicator of a cat's true nature and personality.
The study, which observed the meows of domestic cats and five wildcat species -- including the European wildcat, cheetah and puma -- found that domestication has altered feline vocalizations, increasing the variability of meows while leaving purring largely unchanged.
"Humans pay particular attention to meowing because cats mainly use these sounds towards us," paper author and ecologist professor Danilo Russo of the University of Naples Federico II said in a statement.
"But after we closely examined the acoustic structure, the uniform purr turned out to be the better means of identifying different individuals."
Paper co-author and ethologist Anja Schild of the Freie Universität Berlin added in a statement: "Each cat in our study had its own characteristic purr. Purring often occurs in relaxed situations, such as when petting or in close contact with a trusted person. It also serves to communicate between cat mother and kitten shortly after birth. Meowing, on the other hand, is famous for its versatility."
The findings are based on analysis using automatic speech recognition methods originally developed for human voices. Data was also used from the animal sound archive at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
The research team were tasked with figuring out how reliably a computer could assign each vocalization to the correct individual cat based solely on the sounds they made.
Both purring and meowing were individually distinguishable, but purring was significantly more consistent and a more reliable show of identity.
To place these results in a broader evolutionary context, the researchers compared the assessed meows of domestic cats to those of the five wildcat species using the recordings from the archive.
The findings paint a more complex picture of vocal communication in felines, suggesting that the stability and long history of purring could offer new insights into feline behavior and cognition.
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Russo, D., Schild, A. B., & Knörnschild, M. (2025). Meows encode less individual information than purrs and show greater variability in domestic than in wild cats. Scientific Reports, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-31536-7