What is language? Definition and components
I was going to start this article off with the dictionary definition for language, but reading it made me feel apprehensive. Oxford dictionary states that language is “the system of communication in speech and writing that is used by people of a particular country or area”. Ok, yes we as humans have ‘language,’ but this definition implies other animals do not. This anthropocentric view feels exclusive and evidence of complex communication within the animal kingdom is rife. Attributing ‘language’ solely to humans undermines the multifaceted vocalisations of our predecessors; our complex speech is nothing more than an evolutionary product. Language is not dichotomous, it’s a scale.
While it should be understood that this is my own opinion, I believe a more suitable definition would be “Language is a means of multidirectional communication which consists of a set of sounds, gestures and/or written symbols, used to convey thoughts and feelings to others.”
This raises the question of what constitutes ‘language?’ Its characterisation is built from two components: phonological and lexical syntax. Phonological syntax is the combination of meaningless speech sounds into meaningful sequences. I’ll give an example – ‘a’, ‘t’ and ‘h’, individually have no meaning but when combined to form ‘hat,’ we have created a speech sound with meaning that we call a ‘word.’
Lexical syntax is a sequence composed of individual meaningful signals, deriving its meaning from these elements and how they are structured together. This is taking words and organising them into a sentence
Crucially, language is a tool of communication. While communication is just the process of transferring a message, language is the mechanism that enables this to occur. Although it would be naïve to assume that our language capability is equal to other animals, based on the characterisation that I previously outlined, proto-language evidence is unequivocal.
Where can we see vocal production in other animals?
While I cannot give you an example of ‘human language’ among other species, I am going to outline evidence that illustrates the existence of that same language, but in a primitive form.
The Chestnut Crowned Babbler
Located in southern Australia, this highly social passerine bird composes its songs from distinct, meaningless sounds, akin to word formation in human language. 2 of their calls we see in their repertoire are:
- Flight calls – Which are uttered when a bird flies off, inducing greater movement and increased looking outside the nest in receivers.
- Prompt calls – Used to stimulate nestling begging, it brings about an 8 fold increase in the birds’ amount of time spent looking at the nest in the aviary.
A study on Chestnut-crowned babblers not only demonstrated that these two calls are functionally distinct and composed of perceptually distinct sounds, but each individual element had no meaning. By playing the components individually from both songs, they discovered that individually they elicited no vocal or behavioural response in receivers. This is evidence of phonological syntax in a bird no heavier than 2 AA batteries. While there are clear distinctions between babbler and human language, clear parallels exist too. I would argue this is a rudimentary evolutionary stage of the language produced by humans today.
The Japanese Tit
You may think that having the ability to combine speech elements is just a fundamental part of communication, so attributing it to something as complex as language would be senseless. Well, let me try and persuade you otherwise, using some very interesting data collected from the song calls of the Japanese tit.
Let’s look again at two of their songs:
- A recruitment song is used in a non-predatory context to recruit other flock members to their nest
- A danger call is utilised when a predator is near, to alert other Japanese tits
So they’ve got two songs with different meanings. But, when they sing them together it produces a whole new message. Mobbing. This is an antipredator adaptation that involves many individuals attacking and harassing a predator, usually to protect their offspring. So here we have evidence of lexical syntax. Just like we would put words into a sentence, these birds have joined two previously unrelated calls to create one with a whole new meaning. And the craziest part… the song is bound by grammatical rules. When the birds were played back this call, but with the order of the songs switched, they did not react at all. The call is now meaningless. It’s like changing the word ‘superhero’ to ‘herosuper’ – nonsense.
Bottlenose Dolphins
One of the crucial aspects of language is its dynamicity. New words are added, some are lost and their meanings can change. There is very little evidence of vocal learning and labelling in animals and so it is often thought of as a human trait. But a study almost 40 years ago, proved that bottlenose dolphins can vocally label novel objects. They gave unique whistle sounds to 5 objects, each presented to them in a random order, correctly labelling them in 91% of the 167 trials. More recent data though has told us that as they grow up, bottlenose dolphins develop their own unique identity signal. This signature whistle creates an individual identity, independently of voice features. Yes, dolphins have names! Now while this is cool, it isn’t necessarily evidence of ‘language’. However, I think it’s important to mention, as not only does this show dynamicity, it reinforces the idea that humans are not so different from the animals we share this planet with.
So what makes humans different?
It seems to me that many different species possess various components of language, and our language is nothing more than a combination of these aspects. Humans may have the complete ‘linguistic package’ but the components of language ability have deep evolutionary roots. Illustrated by the previous examples, it’s clear some animals possess numerous rudimentary aspects of ‘human language.’
Humans can utilise their speech in a much more advanced way than most animals. However, in my opinion, the gap we see today is a consequence of two very human abilities
Written communication
Really I think we set ourselves apart because we can communicate in a written language – no other animal has ever been able to do this. This enables us to stably document and pass down information, so each new generation can build on knowledge, discover and innovate at a rate no other species can achieve.
Communicating abstractly
Humans can communicate about concepts that have no physical form nor have been directly experienced by the individual. There is no evidence of this outside humans and research into this field has shown to be contradictory, with many scientists adopting different viewpoints. It raises an interesting thought though. If animals lack the ability to think abstractly, and are only capable of concrete thinking, do they have the need for a complex language system? If they only understand ‘physical’ experiences i.e. food over there or predator approaching, then they have no need to communicate about ‘what they want to eat next Tuesday’. There is no necessity for a language as intricate as ours. However, if our internal thinking does in fact drive our capacity for language – does the existence of such a complex language with humans, imply no other animal thinks as we do?
Editor: A. Nightingale
Sources:
Engesser, S., Holub, J.L., O’Neill, L.G., Russell, A.F. and Townsend, S.W., 2019. Chestnut-crowned babbler calls are composed of meaningless shared building blocks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(39), pp.19579-19584.
Suzuki, T.N., Wheatcroft, D. and Griesser, M., 2016. Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls. Nature communications, 7(1), pp.1-7.
Suzuki, T.N., Wheatcroft, D. and Griesser, M., 2017. Wild birds use an ordering rule to decode novel call sequences. Current Biology, 27(15), pp.2331-2336.
Richards, D.G., Wolz, J.P. and Herman, L.M., 1984. Vocal mimicry of computer-generated sounds and vocal labeling of objects by a bottlenosed dolphin, Tursiops truncatus.. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 98(1), p.10. King, S.L. and Janik, V.M., 2013. Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(32), pp.13216
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