Gašper Beguš on Why Language Doesn’t Make Humans Special
Gašper Beguš is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, where he focuses on interpretable AI and combines linguistics, cognitive science, machine learning, neuroscience, and marine biology.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Gašper Beguš discuss what makes human language exceptional compared to animal communication, whether whales and other animals have true language capabilities, and how properties like cultural transmission and recursion distinguish human speech.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I have a very simple question for you to start off with. What is language and in what ways is the human capacity to communicate by the use of language exceptional in the animal kingdom, or in fact in the world beyond animals?
Gašper Beguš: Actually, it’s not a simple question at all. It’s an extremely complex question. Nobody has a really good definition of language. Maybe definitions are not even that useful. For a while, we’ve defined language as the thing that sets us apart from animals. So it’s the communication system that humans have. But if you look closely, I think the better question is what properties of human language exist and what are the uniquely human properties about our language.
Mounk: Before we get there, what’s an example of some form of language that animals might use, for example?
Beguš: Animals have alarm calls. There is some acoustic vocalization, and that denotes a danger from above or danger from the ground. Those alarm calls are oftentimes not learned vocalizations. With language, you want to have a learned culturally transmitted vocalization. Not something like a cry that you come preborn with, but something that you learn from your caregivers.
Mounk: A dog might yelp when they’re in pain, and a dog in the United States and in Germany and in South Africa is going to yelp more or less the same way, and dogs have an innate ability to understand that that is a fellow member of a species that’s in pain. But that’s not language because it’s not culturally transmitted. It doesn’t vary in this kind of way. It’s not specific enough. Is that what you’re saying?
Beguš: Yeah. For example, you take a vervet monkey or a Campbell’s monkey and have that monkey grow up in the other monkey’s world. That first species will still speak its own innate cries. Whereas if we want to have language, our language is obviously culturally learned. You can take any child, and any child can hear, at the beginning of their lives, any language contrast, any sounds of language, and then slowly they build their internal neural connections in such a way that they only hear and attend to the language that they actually hear. But in principle, a child can learn any language. So it’s learned communication. It changes a lot. We have dialects. The reason we have dialects is because at some point there’s a mother language, and then there are daughter languages, and the daughter languages arise because of mutations and changes in language. So those are all the things that you’re looking for.
Then there are more complex things you have to look for in animals. So is there a lexical principle? Can they talk about things that are not immediately present? I would say there are two broad ways to study language in non-humans. One is to take our language and train other animals in our language. Those would be called language-trained animals.
Mounk: I became obsessed a number of years ago with all of the very cute dogs on Instagram—and, I suppose, TikTok, though I don’t use TikTok—which use buttons with words. There’s a very long history of us fooling ourselves into thinking that animals are communicating with us. There’s a horse by the name of Clever Hans, and it turned out that, in some ways, I forget whether the owner knew that they were kind of cheating and giving hand signals or whether they were doing it unwittingly, I forget the details of the case, but it turned out that Hans wasn’t as clever as he seemed.
But there are some really remarkable clips in which it does seem like these dogs that have access to 100, 150 buttons construct these relatively long sentences, if you want to call them that. They don’t quite have grammar, which are situationally appropriate, and which don’t seem like they’re just pressing a random button like “love you” because they know that their owner seems to be happy when they press that button. There seems to be something more than that going on. Is there?
Beguš: Well, there are even more impressive studies done in the 90s. I started my research in animals with Irene Pepperberg, who was the pioneer of language-trained animals, who had one of the smartest parrots that ever lived, Alex (https://mymodernmet.com/alex-the-african-gray-parrot/). There’s work on bonobos. Kanzi (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/kanzi-the-bonobo-who-learned-language-and-made-stone-tools-dies-at-age-44/) the bonobo recently passed away, and they tried to bring some interface to the animals so that they could communicate with humans. There’s also work on dolphins, for example.
So Kanzi had this keyboard with symbols that had nothing to do with the object they described, and he was able to use them and even combine them. With parrots, it’s great because they don’t need any interface at all. They learned to mimic our human language to perfection. I have recordings of Alex, actually, and I’m studying them. It’s just so amazing how close they can mimic us and master mimicking our language to the degree that we are never able to do the other way around. So that was kind of the first insight into how smart animals are, because parrots probably were considered smart at that time, but not exceptionally smart.
Now you have Irene Pepperberg training Alex the parrot, and Alex could count up to three or four. Not only that, you could give it a plate of green balls and blue squares and ask him how many green balls, and it would count and distinguish compositionally between shape and objects and so on. That really was maybe the first time we really started to appreciate their intelligence. So that’s animal communication or language-trained animals, where you take human language and you try to instill it upon animals.
Mounk: That’s not a language that animals use to communicate with each other, but it shows that they have a capacity to process language in some kind of way, since we’re able to teach a version of our language to them and then they can use that to communicate with us. What about forms of language that animals have to communicate with each other? For those of you who are listening to this or reading the transcript, I see your face nicely framed by many whales in a beautiful poster hanging behind you.
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Whales seem to be quite remarkable in the way they communicate, including the fact, as my producer Leo points out to me, that supposedly baby whales babble in the same way that human babies babble, seemingly to sort of learn how to communicate, to learn to make the sounds that they need to in order to then accurately communicate to other members of a species. Is that a good example of animal communication within one species of animals, and what kind of languages they have?
Beguš: Well, that’s where it becomes really difficult. Because you train an animal in your human language. You understand what the animal is saying because it’s your language. But if you’re observing animals in the wild, you don’t know that language. You don’t speak that language. You don’t even know what is meaningful in that language, if anything at all.
So you go from this terrain where you have your language and you understand most of the things. Kanzi was probably at the level of a three-year-old human baby. It’s always good to think of this animal research in developmental terms. So roughly, if you compare it to a human child, where are they, how many words, what kind of abilities?
Then you go into animals in the wild, and that’s where we’re really just starting in some ways. First of all, back in the day, there wasn’t as sophisticated recording equipment available. It just takes a lot of work. For example, whales live in the open ocean. They dive very deep. It’s not easy to record them and try to see what they do.
So a lot of animals communicate for mating purposes. They vocalize for mating purposes. So you have birdsong. Birdsongs that are learned, not innate. The father usually teaches male offspring to sing. The idea is, I’m very fit, because in addition to searching for food, I can also practice these beautiful notes.
Mounk: But I imagine that a skeptic would say that that doesn’t count as language because it’s a form of communication, obviously, but it’s really a form of signaling. It’s just showing that I have the extra time and resources to sit around with my dad and be taught this beautiful melody, and I can put protein, whatever else it takes, into my vocal cords so I have a nice, loud voice, and all of that is a signal of evolutionary fitness, in the same kind of way in which a peacock has a beautiful tail. The tail doesn’t mean anything, presumably. Perhaps it does, and we’ve missed it. But it’s not like the pattern of a tail has a semantic meaning. It’s a sign of evolutionary fitness.
So presumably, even though those melodies are passed on from bird to bird, there may be differences within a species in how they sing and so on. A skeptic would say that’s not language in the kind of way in which perhaps whales have language.
Beguš: That’s where we get to whales. The mating function is not that exciting from a perspective of human language or comparing human language to other species. But birds have alarm calls, and monkeys have alarm calls. Now the really interesting things happen with whales. The reason why I love studying whales is because they don’t vocalize for mating at all, at least the whales I study don’t. Humpback whales do vocalize for mating. Sperm whales form complex societies. Based on the dialects they speak, they form families and clans. Crucially, they communicate. They exchange vocalizations, learned vocalizations. We know they’re learned because the baby whales babble.
There’s a lot of variation and dialects, and so they exchange those communications while hunting, before hunting, before they dive two kilometers deep to hunt, and when socializing and during giving birth.
Mounk: Presumably one difference would be that if you take a bird from one locality and put it in the vicinity of other birds of that species, the birds of that species might go, wow, we haven’t heard that melody before. That might make the melody more attractive or less attractive to them. But they would still get the melody in the same way as they might get the melody of a bird in the vicinity. Whereas with whales, because it is culturally bound in that way, it appears to be the fact that the dialect they use changes depending on the part of the tribe or the group of whales you’re talking about. If you were able to take a whale from a completely different geography and put it in communication with other whales, they might struggle to understand each other in the way that I would struggle to understand somebody if I was dropped in the middle of Vietnam and people there didn’t happen to speak English.
Beguš: Some birds’ vocalizations are learned as well. It’s actually interesting. You cannot learn human language as a human unless you get linguistic input and you hear language from the beginning. So there are some really unfortunate cases of child neglect or abuse where children were not able to get language until they were around twelve. That’s the critical period. You’re never going to be able to fully master human language if you don’t get it. The same happens with birds. There are some experiments back in the day where, if a bird with learned communication is not exposed to the father’s song, it will never master it to the same level as if it’s exposed to it from birth. Now with whales, we cannot do such experiments. They would be ethically really problematic.
Mounk: I think with birds it even takes a number of generations to build back up the complexity of birdsong, though it was there previously and so on. I take the point that you made earlier that birdsong changes, it’s passed down from father to son and therefore changes. But I meant something slightly different. We may not be able to do the experiment, but there’s reason to believe that the function of whale language depends on mutual comprehension of the content of what they’re saying. Because different sets of whales have particular linguistic conventions that help them communicate, if you introduced a whale from a totally different group, they may not be able to communicate with each other what otherwise they would.
Whereas with a bird, where the purpose is just a mating call, the purpose is to show how beautiful the birdsong is. If you take a bird from the same species but a different geographic region, that may be a very different song from the local ones, but there wouldn’t be that barrier to comprehension. They would register that the bird sings an interesting song and that it seems to take a lot of evolutionary resources. So perhaps that’s a good signal of evolutionary fitness. It wouldn’t lose the communicative potential in the same way that it might in the case of whales.
Beguš: That’s certainly true for mating songs. The question is that some birds also have learned vocalizations for alarm calls, for example. That’s when it becomes interesting in birds. For birds, in a sense, they’re much easier to study, because there’s a lot of work in animal communication research on birds and elephants. We share so many things with birds and elephants. You can conceptualize a predator in birds or elephants. They have trees, they have air, they have ground, all these things that are familiar to us.
Then you come to whales and you don’t even know how to represent the presence of a predator because the ocean is so vast and the light doesn’t travel at all in the ocean. The light gets in water and gets lost so fast. We are so visual in some ways that we try to represent things visually, but whales probably don’t represent things as much visually as they do with sound. They navigate, orient themselves, hunt, and escape predators by emitting echolocation sounds and then hearing what comes back. So it’s really difficult to conceptualize their world and make a good model of their world, because underwater life is just so different.
Mounk: I think we have some different gradations. We have birds that have forms of communication, but it mostly seems to be things like mating calls. We have whales. It’s very hard to know exactly what’s going on, but it seems to share some additional features with human language, like the fact that there are different languages and dialects and so on. Is there something specific about human language? How is it that human language is different from what whales seem to be doing?
Beguš: Well, I can tell you roughly what the story was for sixty years and how we should change it. The idea was that human language is completely different, and for all sorts of reasons. One was that the main aspect of human language that was considered uniquely human was the so-called recursion. It’s a slightly complex property of language, but roughly it says that you can take one element and embed it into an element of the same type. Yascha said that Gasper said that whales have language. You can always make that sentence larger by saying Leo said that Yascha said that Gasper said that whales have language, and so on. It’s this kind of infinite loop of language.
That hasn’t been found. There are some attempts in birdsong, but in the animal kingdom in the wild that principle hasn’t really been found. It’s a very complex principle, and there’s so much we still don’t know about animals that I’m not really surprised that it hasn’t been found. There are other things, like the idea that animals cannot talk about things that are not immediately present. They don’t talk about things that are in the past or in the future. They have only immediate reference.
A lot of these things were debunked by research at various levels. With language-trained animals, bonobos were able to go to another room and talk about things. One favorite example is Alex the parrot saying “banari” for apple. He couldn’t say apple because it’s difficult for them to say P, so he made up a word, banarry. An apple tastes like a banana but looks like a cherry. He put words together, which shows productive compositional compounding.
Across the research, if you take these studies seriously, you realize that there’s very little that is uniquely human about language. Not every other species has all the properties of human language, but there are bits and pieces across animals, especially language-trained animals. We’re only starting to uncover the richness of animal communication in the wild. Slowly, the properties of human language that are exclusively human are being taken away.
The big step now is also artificial intelligence models. That’s a different story, but some of the things that we thought were uniquely human and never achievable are now achievable in these large language models.
Mounk: There are these incredibly cute Instagram videos of humans communicating with dogs in various ways, and that’s remarkable. But what’s even more astonishing is that I now communicate in natural language with some artificial entity that can easily pass itself off as human these days, that can pass the famous Turing test.
This is very different from what
