There are the celebrities of the animal communication world: Nim Chimpsky, Peter the dolphin and Alex the African grey parrot. Their feats have rightly made them famous. Nim is reported to have learned over a hundred words in American Sign Language. Alex was able to ask for water, to count, name colours and say what objects were made of after touching them with his beak. His final words (he died in 2007) were apparently “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.” In a recent breakthrough, scientists used a computer to perform simultaneous translation of a dolphin’s requests to play with seaweed. What’s clear is that animal communication can be extraordinarily sophisticated. But is it ever language? Just over 50 years ago, American linguist Charles Hockett identified what he called the 13 “design features” of communication. Only human language, he argued, contained all 13, and certain crucial properties distinguished it from such things as honey bee dances and gibbon calls.
ArgumentsLanguage is made up of separate, identifiable units. These include sounds, known as phonemes, that distinguish one word from another — like “pin” from “bin”. A gibbon screech, on the other hand, may change from meaning “I’m here” to “I’m angry” simply by getting louder or more emphatic. Language allows us to refer to things that are distance in space, or in time. Animals tend to react and communicate about things that are right in front of them — like a mongoose danger call provoked by a bird of prey. Gradually, however, evidence has accumulated that many animals are able to refer to things that aren’t there — as with by Kanzi the bonobo, who is able to use a communication device to ask for the ingredients for one of his favourite dishes, omelette.
Their systems of communication lack a particular feature of human language, called recursion. It’s a property of the way we order words that means the number of sentences we can produce is theoretically infinite. Alex’s “mother”, Irene Pepperberg, has asked, “what do we learn if we find that a particular trait is or is not restricted to humans. She argues that distinctive properties of communication systems are simply the result of different evolutionary pressures.
