Category — Language

Researchers in the US and the UK have developed a way to record the sounds made by dolphins at a very high resolutions, taking a major step towards a better understanding of how they communicate:

“Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water.   They call it CymaScope and say it reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially.  The resulting “CymaGlyphs,” as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin ‘picture word’.”

The question of whether dolphins have a true ‘language’ is an interesting one.  At what point does communication become language?  Do the basic sounds for warning, defense and group co-ordination made by most animals constitute language?  Would a sophisticated sound-per-concept form of communication between two animals constitute a language?  How complex does communication have to be to be defined as a language?  Is it just a matter of semantics?  Can we open up the definition to include all forms of audible communication?  As with many things (life, consciousness, et al.), I tend to look at communication as residing along a spectrum.  Drawing a hard line to denote where basic communication ends and language begins seems arbitrary to me, and might not be very helpful in understanding how living things communicate.

There may be such a threshhold, but I suspect if it exists it’s not so much dependant on the complexity of the communication, but on what concepts are being represented.  It would be difficult to deny that any system that communicates concepts such as ’self’ and ‘life”, or that includes meta-concepts, allowing the speakers to talk about communication isn’t a language.

That’s the ultimate question that needs to be answered with respect to dolphin (and in general, animal) communication; what kind of concepts do they share with each other?  If we discover that some species have the ability to talk not just about what’s going on in their environment (threats, food, etc) but about their relationships and mental states, will we need to re-evaluate how we treat them?  (hint: I’m leaning towards yes!)