Language and Communication

LOOK WHO’S TALKING

By Tess M.

Getting acquainted with different people from different cultures allows me not only to see similarities and differences in our ways of living, but also it makes me appreciate other languages.

According to experts, language acquisition is defined as the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the understanding of varied and complicated capacities including syntax, phonetics, and extensive vocabulary. I agree that capacity to obtain and utilize language is a key aspect that distinguishes humans from other animals. However, to say that non-human animal communication has limited range of nonsyntactically structured vocabulary tokens that lack cross cultural variation between groups is, I believe, too early to conclude.

In one of my reading sessions with my toddler students (2 to 3 years old), we read a story about animals. To activate my students’ prior knowledge, I asked them how each these animals sound pointing on pictures: “how does a dog sound?” I inquired.  In my part of the world, I instinctively know that the answer is “aw, aw, aw” as I often heard how our native dogs bark in the Philippines. However, of course, that’s not how dogs in America sound. Hurriedly one of my students stood up and, accompanied with facial expression, he answered, “arf, arf, arf.” This isn’t true only for dogs. I also noticed other variations such as: 1) frogs in America say, “ribbet, ribbet” while frogs in the Philippines say, “ko-kak-ko-kak”; 2) roosters in America say, “cock-a-doodle-do” while roosters in the Philippines say, “tik-ti-la-ok.” What fascinating is I learned from my reading that there are more different sounds roosters make than I thought:

- In France, it’s cocorico

- In Dutch, it’s kukeleku

- In German, it’s kikeriki

- In Spanish, its quiquiriquiiii

Having studied Communication Arts, both for my undergraduate and graduate studies, I find this discovery very interesting. I am sure that like human language acquisition, theories on animal communication are also controversial and complicated to explain. However, having this in mind, when you travel around the globe perhaps you can be mindful of who is talking - most likely you’ll find that not only its people sound different, but also people’s interpretations to animals sound.

                                                                "ribeet, ribeet"