The Languages of Animals

When a foraging honeybee returns to the hive having found a rich patch of flowers, she does something extraordinary. She walks a looping figure-of-eight across the vertical comb, waggling her body along the central run, and in the angle and duration of that dance she encodes the direction and distance of the food relative to the sun. Her sisters feel the dance in the dark, read the message, and fly out to the exact spot. It is one of the most sophisticated communication systems known outside our own species, and it is performed by an insect with a brain the size of a pinhead.

What Counts as Language

The honeybee's dance forces an uncomfortable question. Is it language? It carries information, it is learned in part, and it refers to something distant in space and time, which is a feature once thought unique to human speech. Yet it lacks the open-ended flexibility of language proper, the capacity to say anything about anything, to combine a finite set of symbols into an infinite range of meanings. Most scientists reserve the word language for that flexibility, and by that strict measure no other animal has it. But the space between a simple signal and full language turns out to be crowded with fascinating intermediate cases.

Vervet monkeys give different alarm calls for different predators, one for a leopard, another for an eagle, a third for a snake, and other vervets respond appropriately to each, climbing a tree for the leopard call but scanning the ground for the snake. The calls function almost like words, standing for specific things in the world. Prairie dogs appear to encode even finer detail in their alarms, with evidence that their calls can convey the size, shape and even colour of an approaching intruder. These are not conversations, but they are far more than reflexive squeaks of fear.

The deepest communication often happens where we can least perceive it. Elephants produce rumbles so low that much of the sound falls below the range of human hearing, and these infrasonic calls travel for kilometres, letting scattered family members coordinate their movements across the landscape. Sperm whales exchange patterns of clicks called codas, and different populations use different coda repertoires, so that whales from one part of the ocean can be told apart from another by the rhythm of their clicking, a difference that looks very much like dialect, perhaps even culture.

Meaning Without Words

Much animal communication carries no discrete message at all and is no less important for that. The song of a bird advertises the singer's fitness, his territory, his readiness to mate, in a continuous stream of information that other birds read fluently. Scent marks left by a wolf or a tiger announce identity, sex, reproductive state and the age of the mark itself, a chemical notice board updated and reread by every animal that passes. A dog's posture, the set of its ears, the carriage of its tail, the bristling of its fur, all broadcast its intentions to any creature fluent in the grammar of the body.

Honesty is the perpetual tension running through all of it. A signal is only useful if it can be trusted, yet there is always an advantage to be gained by lying, by seeming stronger, healthier or more dangerous than one truly is. Nature polices this constant temptation in ingenious ways. Many signals are costly to fake: a stag's roar reveals the true size of his chest, a bird's bright plumage can only be grown and maintained by a genuinely healthy animal. The system works because cheating is expensive.

What all of this suggests is not that animals secretly possess human language, but that communication is far older, broader and stranger than the narrow channel of human speech. Information flows constantly through the living world, in dances and scents and postures, in clicks and rumbles and songs, in signals we are only beginning to decode. To call none of it language may be technically correct. To dismiss it as mere instinct would be to miss one of the richest dimensions of life on Earth.