When animals signal to each other (or we give auditory, visual, or tactile cues) they’re usually conveying information about the situation at hand, Jaakkola says. On the other hand, “with real language, we actually don’t typically talk about the things that are going on around us,” she says. “It would be really odd if you and I were sitting together and I started naming things on the desk.”
But that is something animals like dolphins seem to do. Which is why, Jaakkola says, if we were trying to decipher if dolphins had “language,” we would probably start by thinking like an animal—looking to see if any sound units corresponded to an object at hand or an activity we could see happening simultaneous to the making those sounds. [...]
Plus, even if animals do have language, there’s no guarantee that we’d recognize it when we saw (or heard) it. “One of the pitfalls I think we have in a lot of studies, whether it’s in animals or aliens, is that we only have one example of languages,” Kershenbaum says. In other words, we have no way of knowing what we can’t understand.
Some researchers postulate that dolphins actually do speak a language through their echolocation, and that they speak through pictures generated by sound vibrations. This is a relatively new concept not yet widely accepted—but if it was true, it would go a ways in bolstering Kershenbaum’s point: the pictorial-vibration-based communiques would be so far from what we know as “language” that we don’t have anywhere near the ability to see, hear, or understand it in a meaningful way.
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