What animals, other than humans, do we know (scientifically) have language?

Depends on how you define language. Back in ye olde days when I took cognitive neuroscience in college, there was some amount of controversy. Is a bird’s warning call language? What about the honeybee dance?

Bees communicate to others thru there dance. Source

actually my source was my son’s 2nd grade science project, but this supports what he said.

Whale song?

@nikipedia Any claims by scientists that using blank criteria, an animal has language.

By defining language as a form of communication, there isn’t a species of animal that I can think of that doesn’t have a language. Creatures communicate in many ways including using vocal chords/noise/tones, scent, body movement and other actions.

Bees, Wolf Howls, Whale Song, have all been mapped to codified structure. They are languages. Dolphin Chirp and Finch Song is being mapped successfully as well.

The Figure 8 Waggle Dance of the Bee encodes for distance, direction, wind drift, quality of pollen, and even suggests an optimal route to the booty.

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Ants, on the other hand, seem not to have a language. Rather than communicating with any syntactically structured language, their movements are more like plants, being a system of triggers and switches, set off by pheromones on the trail. That’s not language, and it is not communication. That’s simple cause/reaction to stimuli. There is no meaning conveyed and no codified structure.

What’s interesting about ants though, is that as individuals, they act as non-intelligent creatures. But as an entire colony, a quasi-intelligence seems to appear.

Linguists do not consider animal communication to be “language” because animals lack the ability to reason and there is no “culture” among animals, which is required for “language”. That’s the linguists’ point of view. Of course one dictionary definition of language is “any communication among animals” and thus animal communication would qualify as language.

See this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language and look at the section “Aspects of human language”. There is no “animal language” that meets all of those aspects.

Other people have mentioned a few. I’ll add crows. not only do they have language but they also make rudimentary tools to solve problems. They have intelligence. parrots also have language and have been shown to be exceptionally intelligent. Dolphins definitely communicate amongst themselves and attempt communication with humans. Wikipedia often has wrong information and so newer thought is that any animal that has communication amongst it’s peers and also makes tools to solve problems has reasoning capacity. Thus crows and apes reason…and so do other species on occasion.

@DominicX According to Con Slobodchikoff at the University of Arizona, prairie dogs meet the 13 criteria laid out by Charles Hockett.

Are ‘they’ not thinking dolphins are maybe smarter than us? And why should they talk to us? We can’t live in their world.

@faye Source?

Sorry, I shouldn’t have tried to answer. I don’t know how to link. I read, I “swam’ with the dolphins. As I touched her I felt ashamed that ‘we’ used her that way. No source.

Elephants too: I think I remember seeing a nature show where some scientists were using microphones to pick up very low-pitched elephant calls and were astounded at how complex it all was…
and I’d hafta disagree with linguists… language is about communication more than anything, isn’t it? But as for culture, I think a lot of animals have that in a sense too anyway, no? Ways of conduct, rituals, even dances of sorts? But I dunno I’m not an expert by any stretch of the word! : )

Just to be clear, I’m looking for animals that scientists have studied and then claimed have language, as backed up by research and set criteria, not your own personal opinion.

@DancingMind

True, language is about communication, but aren’t we now just watering down the word “language” to be synonymous with “communication”? Animals have communication, no doubt. But “communication” and “language” are not the same thing. At least, in the eyes of linguists. Language’s function is communication, yes, but not all forms of communication are language.

@DominicX GA. For example, I would never say that dancing isn’t a form of communication. But a language…? I don’t know that I’d go that far. Or maybe I would, I don’t know, I’m not a linguist so much as a total n00b to the field of linguistics.

@papayalily

This question is impossible to answer unless you define what you are calling “language.” If you do this, I am sure I can give you plenty of studies- it’s an area I find very interesting.

I read someplace that prairie dogs can alert each other to two different types of predators: ground based or air based. When one of them makes the ground based call it tells the other ones to look out or get near the hole. When one yells the danger from the air call, in response to the sighting of a raptor, it means to get in the hole now. The danger can come immediately from out of the sky.
But here is the amazing thing. Years of being hunted have taught them to discriminate between a human walking with or without a gun. If carrying a rifle they make the air based warning – the danger can come immediately without warning.
That sounds like language to me.
Here is one of many articles on prairie dog language.

The answer to your question depends on the definition of language but I am almost 100% sure that our more recent ancestors such as homo sapiens neandertalensis, homo habilis (sorry if spelling is off, my greek/latin are lacking) had a language by all modern definitions.