Animal language

If language is just "verbal behavior," as Skinner said (1957), then there is nothing special about human language to separate itself from the singing of birds or the barking of dogs. It is on exactly this point that Chomsky (1959) picked his famous fight with Skinner, and insisted that human language is something special.

Although Skinner himself never responded to Chomsky's critique, others have done so on his behalf in the intervening half century. Here is an example from
1990.

Personally, I have long been fascinated by experiments into "animal language" in a rather specialized sense of the term -- not "animal verbal behavior" in a sense that would involve barks or tweets especially. The implicit, and often the explicit, view of many who study the language of whales, or who teach sign language to primates, is that language in a specifically human sense has non-human application. Maybe language in the narrower sense of the term, though rare, is not entirely unique to our species.

Just some plankton for thought.