Animal Communication and Human Language

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Abstract
To apply the notion of language to the animal world is admissible only at the price of misusing terms. We know that it has been impossible until now to prove that animals enjoy, even in a rudimentary form, a means of expression endowed with the characteristics and functions of human speech. All serious observations made of animal communities, all attempts to establish or verify, by means of various technical devices, any form of speech comparable to that of man have failed. It does not seem that animals which emit certain kinds of calls are thereby displaying any behaviour from which we may infer that they are conveying ‘spoken’ messages to one another. The fundamental conditions for a strictly linguistic communication seem to be lacking even in the higher animal world.

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