This week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine has an article titled Can Prairie Dogs Talk? The answer is so obviously no, that one is forced to read it to see what kind of case the author can make. Turns out he makes an interesting one.
It is easy to come up with a definition of language that bars prairie-dogese. If you define a language as the set of sentences that can be generated by its syntactical rules, why then the answer is still no. Prairie dogs do not speak in sentences and appear to have no generative syntax. But I don’t define language that way.
A biologist with the unusual name of Constantine Slobodchikoff has been studying prairie dogs for decades. He has demonstrated that the varmints make a distinct sound when people appear and a different sound when a coyote appears. This kind of thing has long been known about vervet monkeys and suggests the minimum that one can try to pass off as a language.
However, the vervet sounds appear to be innate rather than learned and prompt different reactions: tree climbing in case of the leopard warning, ducking under bushes for the hawk or eagle warning, and bolting upright while checking the ground for a snake warning. Maybe these shouts are words, although there is no reason to insist on it. The vervets have a small set of distinctive warnings that produce different responses in the listeners. Perhaps prairie dogs have something similar, except for the fact that their response to pretty much any danger is to run down into their underground world.
Let’s remind ourselves that in human language, words are cultural inventions that can be understood in a context. Some words like into and doesn’t require other words if they are to mean anything at all, and some words like table have a default meaning, but if said alone are likely to provoke a response along the lines of What about a table? Or perhaps the speaker is eighteen-months old, in which case the response may be yes, it’s a ping-pong table. It is going to take more than this to argue that vervets or prairie dogs have words.
Then Slobodchikoff took his work a step further, sending students wearing different colored tee shirts to wander amongst the prairie dog grounds. The animals made their usual human warning but combined it with another sound that varied according to tee-shirt color. It seems the prairie dogs might be speaking phrases. Some scholars object to the proposal because there is no visible reaction to the different bits of color information, but that point misses one of the unusual features of language. Language needn’t produce any reaction at all in the audience. I can sit in a chair for two hours reading a book, showing no response beyond the occasional turning of a page. Yet I can then arise from my chair a changed man. The only way you might discover the change is three months later I say something based on that book.
Suppose that some humans belong to an environmental group and when they go hiking they wear their organization’s green tee shirt. They pride themselves on the way they don’t mess with nature, and they pose no threat to the prairie dog community. But perhaps there is another group, this one a gang of trouble makers who wear red shirts and like to indulge in sadistic torment of the prairie dog, pouring gasoline down the holes and setting it on fire. Suddenly the human/green and human/red cries carry important, distinctive bits of information. I do not know, and the article does not say, but it suggests an area for further research: do the prairie dogs ever make use of the information in their distinctive warning cries?
In my last post I discussed “The Ultimate Test” of a theory about language: could such a system evolve? Is it possible for prairie dogs to have evolved the ability to speak in phrases about events on the earth’s surface? Unfortunately, these animals lead the most important part of their lives underground where observation is difficult to conduct. Just how communal are these animals? They do not seem to be like mole rats, another burrowing mammal, that live like eusocial insects. Mole rats have a reproductive queen while the other females do the labor of the colonies. I know nothing about their communication system, but eusocial insects use elaborate chemical systems to pass the news. Prairie dogs are not this cooperative, but maybe they are at least humanly communitarian, in the sense of sharing a great deal of the burden, joys, food, and information of life with their fellows. If they are heavily into sharing, I can easily imagine an evolutionary process that leads to sharing information through some kind of phrase-based system. But prairie dogs do not seem to live that way. A quick check of Wikipedia shows they are family-based, with rivalries between families and breeding groups. “A prairie dog town may contain 15-26 family groups.” A mix of families that do not share much between them does not sound like fertile soil for evolving a communication system much beyond warning alarms.
Warning sounds are a valuable group benefit that have evolved many times in many non-communal species, and if prairie dogs can make complex, phrase-like warnings, that is an interesting discovery. But warning sounds, even complex ones, are not going to satisfy this blog’s understanding of language.
The definition of language that is used on this blog proposes a triad of (1) a speaker (or signer or writer) and (2) a listener (or observer or reader) paying joint attention to (3) a topic. The prairie dog does not have this triad. First, there seem to be innumerable speakers, who—at best—pass along a message, but more likely act on a reflex that sets many of them to issuing the same signal.
Second, it is not clear that any of the listeners pay joint attention to the intruder. They hear the warning and zip back underground. Like vervets they respond appropriately, but do not seem to attend to it in the same way the speaker does. Why would they? The alarm is a cry for action, not a bit of social bonding.
Finally, they have only one topic: intruders. It may be unfair to demand that animals with a grape-sized brain take much interest in the nature of the world around them, but without it they are not going to discuss many topics.
The triad requires a special kind of community, one in which members are willing to inform one another of secret information, and one in which members are willing to listen and trust what other members report. It also requires that community members be capable of addressing any topic that seems worthy of study. A language restricted to various forms of shouting, “Look out,” would be no language at all.
It is always good to be reminded that we build our nature on powers scattered throughout the biological world, but it is also good to keep in mind that there is a reason for having and not having a power. We live in cultural niches and need language to survive in them. Prairie dogs can do many things that I cannot do, and apparently they can spread the word about my tee-shirt color, but they are not on the royal road to Shakespeare.
Comments