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Do animals communicate using a language?

Since animals (and other life forms) obviously engage in communication, the question in the title must be seen as relating to whether the systems that enable this are comparable to those of specifically human language. This is addressed here in terms of the cognitive organization that enables humans to produce and understand an essentially unbounded range of expressions. The internal components of that organization are outlined, and the evidence from animal communication discussed in relation to these. It is concluded that with very limited partial exceptions, animal communication does not evidence capacities that would allow for a system comparable to human language. The richness which is apparent in animal communication, however, suggests that human and some non-human communication systems do share an important component: a rich capacity for pragmatic interpretation. How we take this question clearly depends on how we define its terms. If communication is a matter of one organism emitting some indicator (behavioral or otherwise) from which another organism derives information, then it is evident that animals do that. Even bacteria: some of these are sensitive to chemical signals produced by others, and their activity is regulated in part by this (Miller & Bassler 2001). Everything from there on up “communicates” in this general sense. Indeed, genes themselves communicate with one another: the inappropriately described “Language gene” FOXP2 codes for a protein that does not build structure but is rather a transcription factor that regulates the expression of a variety of other genes (Fisher & Vernes 2015). Everything turns, then, on what we want to think of as a “language.” The word is sometimes used in a way that includes essentially any collection of indicators with reasonably consistent interpretations in some context: thus, one finds mention of the “language” of traffic lights, the “language of the cinema”, etc. If that is what we mean by a language, there is no question that animals of all sorts do indeed “communicate using a language,” and the question becomes essentially trivial. If, on the other hand, we mean by language “the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way” as my online dictionary puts it, the question becomes an interesting one: do the communication systems of animals have the essential properties of human language or not? Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle (Lofting 1920 et seq.) certainly believed animal communication systems have the same character and expressive capacity as human languages, though perhaps sometimes conveyed in different modalities. That made for a series of good stories, but the