THE LATEST ON DOLPHIN "LANGUAGE"

DO THE SQUAWKS AND SQUEAKS OF DOLPHINS INDICATE A LANGUAGE?

We Have Our Thoughts And A Link To The latest Research Report for Laymen

 Public Domain / Truncatus. bottlenose dolphins group

Those of us who use two way radios a lot often speak of the process of transmitting as "Squawking".

"Squawking " and "squeaking" are pretty apt descriptions for the Dolphin communications that fall into the human audible range. That's pretty much what it sounds like to us, patterned and changing clearly carrying information to other dolphins, but mostly "squawking" and "squeaking" to us. But for those of us who have been to sea, and especially been under water with the marine life, and knocked about the world a bit some human parallels come to mind. All Indo-European languages have a familiar sound to them to people born into a different Indo- European language. There is just a sort of ratio of vowel and consonant sounds and an absence of non emotional tonal information that has a familiar ring about it.  Down on the heavy on the vowels end of the Indo-European spectrum is French which must have sounded familiar yet unintelligible to the first Polynesians to hear it. The Polynesians have the most vowel laden language in the Pacific Basin. 

 In Asia there are a number of languages that Westerners find hard to master because they have tonal elements in non emotion laden speech. Tonal elements in addition to vowels and consonants are manipulated to convey information on a routine basis. To the native Indo European speaker these Asian languages with tonal elements seem almost impossible to master due to there being a third source of information transmittal besides combinations of vowels and consonants. To the Asian native tonal language speaker the Indo-European languages are easier to learn in terms of building a vocabulary but with the missing third element of information transmittal they must seem inadequate for many purposes. The Indo European languages are in fact adequate for transmitting just about any sort of information as long as the speaker has a sufficient vocabulary. That level of vocabulary only builds up with long use and exposure to the language. So among humans, East and West have difficulty communicating but we have been able to learn each other languages over time for centuries.

 To Human scientists the question of dolphin communications amounting to language is still being debated. We know for example that among the sounds made some are for communications dolphin to dolphin and some are for echo location, biological sonar. We haven't found that any one has asked the question yet if other dolphins can use the return echo of other near by dolphins. That seems likely and if so in any given pod of dolphins doing echo location without any conscious linguistic effort all the information exchanged by a human driver and his / her opposite or back seat companion is being exchanged just without the usual human acrimony. This may not be "conversation" in a linguistic sense, but there could be an awful lot more dolphin to dolphin information being exchanged during echo location "squawking" than previously surmised. We don't think that echo-location squawking can be eliminated from dolphin "language" as defined as the total of means by which dolphins convey information between and among each other. Adding to the difficulty of understanding the patterned squawks and squeaks that we are certain convey meaning is the fact that much of the Dolphin's sound producing and reception ability is out side of the human audible range.  

 The ancient Polynesians called Dolphins "the people who live in the sea". Science now tells us that these sea mammals have a brain to body mass ratio comparable to humans. Sailors for centuries have know that Dolphins are social and lead complex lives and are very communicative. They live into their middle 50s. Size to brain ratio wise,  and in terms of body length and weight they are very similar to us. Socially they live in very complex groups in which scientists detect elements that seem awfully like "politics" .  But they live in a completely alien environment from us and if they truly have elevated communications to the level of language, it is very complex and different from ours. Best of all about dolphins according to our young friend who heads up our surfing section is the fact that "They always surf naked dude!".  Yea their life style looks pretty good. 

 Well so much for our observations and opinions on the subject. Recently an expert gave an address on the subject of Dolphin speech and it is now a video on "TED WEEKENDS' a feature of Huff Post. Click in , watch and listen to this presentation by Behavioral biologist Denise Herzing:     HAS THIS EXPERT OBSERVED DOLPHIN SPEECH?