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This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

Animals and human language

George Yule
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Summary

One evening in the mid-1980s my wife and I were returning from an evening cruise around Boston Harbor and decided to take a waterfront stroll. We were passing in front of the Boston Aquarium when a gravelly voice yelled out, “Hey! Hey! Get outa there!” Thinking we had mistakenly wandered somewhere we were not allowed, we stopped and looked around for a security guard or some other official, but saw no one, and no warning signs. Again the voice boomed, “Hey! Hey you!” As we tracked the voice we found ourselves approaching a large, glass-fenced pool in front of the aquarium where four harbor seals were lounging on display. Incredulous, I traced the source of the command to a large seal reclining vertically in the water, with his head extended back and up, his mouth slightly open, rotating slowly. A seal was talking, not to me, but to the air, and incidentally to anyone within earshot who cared to listen.

Deacon (1997)

There are a lot of stories about creatures that can talk. We usually assume that they are fantasy or fiction or that they involve birds or animals simply imitating something they have heard humans say (as Deacon discovered was the case with the loud seal in Boston Aquarium). Yet we know that creatures are capable of communicating, certainly with other members of their own species. Is it possible that a creature could learn to communicate with humans using language?

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The Study of Language , pp. 8 - 19
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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