Animals and human language

• Creatures certainly are capable of communicating

with other members of their own species. It is
not quite possible that they could learn to
communicate with humans using language.
Human language has properties that make it so
unique that it is quite unlike any other
communication system and hence un-learnable
by any other creature. Stories about creatures
that can talk are fantasy or fiction or involve birds
or animals simply imitating something they have
heard humans say (parrots, chimpanzees, etc.).
• Language is, today, an inseparable part of
human society. Human civilization has been
possible only through language. It is through
language only that humanity has come out of
the stone age and has developed science, art
and technology in a big way. Language is a
means of communication, it is arbitrary, it is a
system of systems. We know that Speech is
primary while writing is secondary.
Properties of Human Language
• Language is human so it differs from animal
communication in several ways. Language can
have scores of characteristics but the following
are the most important ones: language is
arbitrary, productive, creative, systematic, vocalic,
social, non-instinctive and conventional. These
characteristics of language set human language
apart from animal communication. Some of these
features may be part of animal communication;
yet they do not form part of it in total.
 Language is Arbitrary:
• Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no
inherent relation between the words of a
language and their meanings or the ideas
conveyed by them. There is no reason why a
female adult human being be called a woman in
English, aurat in Urdu, Zen in Persian and Femine
in French. The choice of a word selected to mean
a particular thing or idea is purely arbitrary but
once a word is selected for a particular referent,
it comes to stay as such. It may be noted that had
language not been arbitrary, there would have
been only one language in the world.
• Generally speaking, there is no ‘natural’ connection
between a language form and its meaning (Example:
the words dog / ‫ كلب‬have nothing to do with the
animal suggested by them). The linguistic form has no
natural or ‘iconic’ relationship with that animal. This
aspect of the relationship between linguistic signs and
object in the world is described as arbitrariness. For
the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be
a clear connection between the conveyed message and
the signal used to convey it. The set of signals used in
animal communication is finite and they are non-
arbitrary.
•
 Language is Social:
• Language is a set of conventional communicative
signals used by humans for communication in a
community. Language in this sense is a
possession of a social group, comprising an
indispensable set of rules which permits its
members to relate to each other, to interact with
each other, to co-operate with each other; it is a
social institution. Language exists in society; it is a
means of nourishing and developing culture and
establishing human relations.
 Language is Symbolic:
• Language consists of various sound symbols
and their graphological counterparts that are
employed to denote some objects,
occurrences or meaning. These symbols are
arbitrarily chosen and conventionally accepted
and employed. Words in a language are not
mere signs or figures, but symbols of meaning.
The intelligibility of a language depends on a
correct interpretation of these symbols.
 Language is Systematic:
• Although language is symbolic, yet its symbols
are arranged in a particular system. All languages
have their system of arrangements. Every
language is a system of systems. All languages
have phonological and grammatical systems, and
within a system there are several sub-systems.
For example, within the grammatical system we
have morphological and syntactic systems, and
within these two sub-systems we have systems
such as those of plural, of mood, of tense, etc.
 Language is Vocal:
• Language is primarily made up of vocal sounds
only produced by a physiological articulatory
mechanism in the human body. In the
beginning, it appeared as vocal sounds only.
Writing came much later, as an intelligent
attempt to represent vocal sounds. Writing is
only the graphic representation of the sounds
of the language. So the linguists say that
speech is primary.
 Cultural transmission
• Human beings do not inherit their language from
their parents the way they inherit physical
features such as brown eyes and dark hair. They
acquire a language in a culture with other
speakers and not from parental genes. This
process whereby a language is passed on from
one generation to the next is described as
cultural transmission. Humans are born with
some kind of predisposition to acquire language
in a general sense. However, they are not born
with the ability to produce utterances in a specific
language such as English.
• No language was created in a day out of a
mutually agreed upon formula by a group of
humans. Language is the outcome of evolution
and convention. Each generation transmits this
convention on to the next. Like all human
institutions languages also change and die, grow
and expand. Every language then is a convention
in a community. It is non-instinctive because it is
acquired by human beings. No body gets a
language in heritage; he acquires it because he an
innate ability.
 Duality
• Human language is organized at two levels or layers
simultaneously, at the level of individual sounds with
no particular meaning such as b, n, i, and at the level of
words or combinations of such sounds with meaning
such as bin, nib etc. This property is called ‘duality’ (or
‘double articulation’). This is one of the most
economical features of human language because, with
a limited set of discreet sounds, we are capable of
producing a very large number of sound combinations
(words) which are distinct in meaning. Among other
creatures, each communicative signal appears to be a
single fixed form that cannot be broken down into
separate parts.
Language is Productive and Creative:
• Language has creativity and productivity. The
structural elements of human language can be
combined to produce new utterances, which
neither the speaker nor his hearers may ever
have made or heard before any, listener, yet
which both sides understand without
difficulty. Language changes according to the
needs of society.
• Humans are continually creating new expressions
and novel utterances by manipulating their
linguistic resources to describe new objects and
situations. This property is described as
‘productivity’ (or ‘creativity’ or ‘open-
endedness’). There is no limit to the potential
number of utterances in any human language.
The communication systems of other creatures
do not appear to have this type of flexibility.
•
 communicative and informative
property of human language
• Human beings unintentionally send out a number of
nonverbal signals in the course their communication
(example: sneezing- have cold; shifting around in seat-
not at ease; strange accent- from another part of the
country etc). These are called communicative and
informative signals. This property is unique to human
language. When while speaking out verbally, we are
intentionally communicating. Both these factors are
analyzed as potential means of communication while
we consider the properties of human language.
•
 Displacement
• Animal communication seems to be designed
exclusively for this moment, here and now. It
cannot effectively be used to relate events that
are far removed in time and place. Humans, on
the other hand, can refer to past and future time.
This property of human language is called
displacement. It allows language users to talk
about things and events not present in the
immediate environment. This property allows us
to talk about things and places whose existence
we cannot even be sure of.