Animal Communication
Language is confined to humans, communication is not. There are remarkable communication systems in the non-human world that help animals to find food, migrate, or reproduce.
However, these communication systems differ from human language in at least two respects:
- Displacement: Only human language allows us to communicate about things that are not present in space or time, for example about a friend who is currently not with us, or about last year's summer vacation.
- Creativity: Language enables us to produce and understand any number of messages that have never been heard before and that may contain novel ideas. Animal communication systems, by contrast, are fixed in terms of the messages that can be conveyed.
Further arguments can be found in this short video:
Despite some more or less successful attempts to teach animals to use human language (e.g. the chimpanzee Washoe in the 1960s or Kanzi in the 1990s), their communication skills are highly limited.
On the left: Kanzi, the young Bonobo, takes an apple after having shown the appropriate symbol on the symbolic computer keyboard.