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Difference Between Human Language and Animal Communication
Characteristics of Human Language That Make it Different From Animal Communication
Animal communication systems do not possess many of the distinctive qualities, attributes, or characteristics that make language an entirely human possession. A bee is only capable of making the buzzing sound, while cats can only meow.
Therefore, scholars have noted a few distinctive qualities of human language that it does not share with the animal kingdom:
- Displacement: Even if it can meow and lick its owner’s hands, a pet cat that went missing the day before won’t be able to tell them where it spent the prior night. Humans can, however, envision what could or might not happen in the future and can discourse about both positive and negative events that have occurred in the past. The term for this is displacement. Systems for animal communication lack this quality. The bee dance does, however, very slightly display this quality.
- Arbitrariness: As was already explained, the presence of nectar close to the beehive is the only significance behind the round and sickle dances of the bee. However, in human language, there is no exact relationship between the language’s shape and its meaning. The animal it represents, the dog, is nothing like the term dog. However, several onomatopoeic words mean precisely what they imply, such as stream, cuckoo, scratch, splash, and boom. They exist in all languages, but they are few. The majority of words have no connection to the things they represent. Arbitrariness is the term for this.
- Duality or Double articulation: Human language is made up of two levels: the physical level known as the form, and the meaning level, where the physical forms are employed to convey meaning as described in 2 above. At the physical level of spoken language, we create individual sounds like, for example, b, n, and I which have no significance at all by themselves. However, by combining them in a certain way, we may create words with meaning like bin and nib. To create all of the language’s words, a precise combination of about forty vowel sounds and an equivalent number of consonant sounds are needed. The term “duality” or “double articulation” refers to this trait. In contrast, there is just one level of sound in animal communication, with no room for combinations. If the written language takes the shape of individual letters (the alphabet) and the order in which they are joined to produce meaningful words, the spoken language takes the form of sounds. For instance, although write is a combination, for rwtei it is not. Every language has a unique system for combining spoken and written letters and sounds.
- Creativity or Productivity: Humans are capable of consistently coming up with novel word combinations or whole new words, a trait known as creativity or open-mindedness. Humans have the ability to produce and comprehend an infinite number of sentences, some of which they may have never heard or been uttered before by anyone. Noam Chomsky calls creativity an essential property of language because it gives us the means for expressing an infinite number of thoughts and for responding appropriately in an infinite number of novel situations. This characteristic is not present in animals. They are unable to combine different elements; their situation is one signal, one meaning. Lemurs in Madagascar have been seen to make three distinct calls: chutter when a snake is approaching, rraup when an eagle is nearby, and chutt-rraup when they see a snake-like flying creature. All three of these signals, though, remain constant and have no further significance. Only humans can create new words and combine old ones in novel ways. For instance, RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory and is utilised in computers, was created in New York and London. In every human language, new words are constantly being created and/or created by merging already existing terms.
- Cultural Transmission: People can learn the languages that are spoken around them from birth. An infant born in Kashmir and raised by people who speak Kashmiri would naturally pick up Kashmiri as either its mother tongue or first language; it would not be able to communicate in English. We may learn a culture’s language through interacting with that society daily. We refer to this as cultural transmission. If a child is removed from Kashmir and raised in another culture, the same child who is born there might learn a new language. Therefore, it is evident that both spoken and written language are unique to humans. The former is universal; all typical children born in a given culture will speak that culture’s language. Written language, on the other hand, is more formal and can be acquired in a classroom, at home with a teacher, or elsewhere. Children who are born stupid cannot speak the language, but with the right training, they may be able to write it. You won’t be able to hear the deaf, but they shouldn’t have any trouble learning to read and write. As Braille is used for the blind to help them read and write, the deaf and dumb can be taught sign language as a means of expression. Today, there are several variations of sign language. The three most often used sign languages now are BSL (British Sign Language), ASL (American Sign Language), and AUSLAN (from Australia).
