“It’s the silly season,” as John Wells complained, and a Reuters-syndicated “off-beat” story is making the rounds. The story was incubated by Bray Leino Public Relations on behalf of West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, suggesting that Fresian cows in the West Country “moo” with a Somerset drawl. Much of the article relies on the anecdotal testimony of local farmers: “I spend a lot of time with my Friesians and they definitely ‘moo’ with a Somerset drawl … I’ve spoken to the other farmers in the West Country group and they have noticed a similar development in their own herds. I think it works the same as with dogs—the closer a farmer’s bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent.” When approached for comment, Wells said that since such dialects are well known among birds, it can’t be ruled out entirely, but that he “thought it was highly unlikely.”

Wells provides a very good reason to doubt the formation of accents in domesticated cows:

Cows, of course, do not in general form stable isolated populations such as would presumably be necessary to allow such regional diversity to develop. On the contrary, cattle are bought and sold and trucked around the country and indeed internationally.¹

The cows of Somerset may be a poor example, but evidence abounds of dialects in animals other than human. The most famous example, already mentioned, is in bird song, but it is not solely birds that have evidenced such geographical variation. Otters, frogs and monkeys also have dialects.

When, in 2005, Edge magazine asked 120 scientists, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” George Dyson provided a fascinating answer:

During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic “tok” and “tlik.”

I believe this correspondence between human language and raven language is more than coincidence, though this would be difficult to prove.

In 2004, The Guardian published an article on duck accents differing between London and Cornwall, suggesting that ducks were mimicking human differences in dialect. As Language Log pointed out:

If you read through the direct quotes in the story in The Guardian, what she said is that the London ducks “speak” as they do because, in contrast to the Cornish ducks, they have to make themselves heard over the noise of city life. She then compared this to the difference between the Cockney and Cornish accents in English. Her thesis is that both ducks and humans are responding to differences in their environment. I’d need more evidence to persuade me that this is true of the differences in English, but it is very different from the hypothesis that the ducks have mimicked human regional accents.

There may well be a correspondence here, and it is more than coincidence, but this is not mere causality: both are effects of the same cause. But this is something perhaps more important: language is part of our ecology.

The progress of science has been relentless in its deconstruction of human exceptionality. Copernicus removed us from the center of the universe, and Darwin made us animals. Since then, language has been the last resort of our uniqueness: we, and we alone, can speak. To maintain this claim, of course, we’ve needed to define “speak” in a very peculiar way. For instance, linguists claim that a defining point of language is that it is arbitrary. This is simply not true. We have a number of words that are onomatopoeic—the word is created by the sound of the thing itself. We also have ideophones, and more generally, sound symbolism. These sounds emerge from the ecology a culture inhabits. Ecologies do not sound the same; a different predominance of animal species, even a different predominance of trees and plants that rustle differently in the wind, can greatly change the ambient sound of a place. Human language, evolved ultimately from mimicking animal calls for hunting, owes much to biomimicry for the general sound and ambience of the ecology it evolved in.

Another portion of language owes to the structure of the human throat, and to the basic synaesthetic experience.

Most sound symbols are bound to a specific language. However, philologists have proposed some universal sound symbols. The symbol /I/ is found suffixes across many languages to denote smallness. Examples are English -ling, -let, Old English -icel, Greek -lein, and L -icellum, -iculum. Abrubt sounds and acts are often represented by plosives. The sound of an object whizzing by in the air is often represented by fricatives. Nasal sounds are often used to represent ringing or reverberation. Related to /I/ is /i/ which is often used to represent high-frequency sound, small size, sharpness, or rapid movement. /U/ and /a/ are often used to low-frequency sound, large size, softness, and slow movement. …

Phonesthetics is the study of the aesthetic symbolism of sounds. As lexicology once might have been, phonesthetics is a nebulous and subjective field residing on the fringes of psychology, psycholinguistics, phonetics, and poetics. Nevertheless, the idea is fairly simple: if multiple words share both a similar meaning and a similar sound component, that sound component, called a phonestheme, can be identified and defined.²

In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram discusses the Koyukon language, which was so onomatopoeic and deeply informed by various bird songs, they would literally speak to birds.

The Artic tern (k’idagaas’), the northern phalarope (tiyee), the rusty blackbird (ts’uhutlts’eegga), the blackpoll warbler (k’oot’anh), the slate colored junco (k’it’otlt’ahga)—all have such names. Written transcription, however, cannot convey the remarkable aptness of these names, which when spoken in Koyukon have a lilting, often whistle like quality. The interpenetration of human and nonhuman utterances is particularly vivid in the case of numerous bird songs that seem to enunciate whole phrases or statements in Koyukon.

Many bird calls are interpreted as Koyukon words … what is striking about these words is how perfectly they mirror the call’s pattern, so that someone outside the tribe who knows birdsongs can readily identify the species when the words are spoken in Koyukon. Not only the rhythym comes through, but also some of the tone, the “feelâ€? that goes with it.

As we ponder such correspondences, we come to realize that the sounds and rhythyms of the Koyukon language have been deeply nourished by these nonhuman voices.

Hence the whirring, flutelike phrases of the hermit thrush, which sound in the forest thickest at twilight, speak the Koyukon words sook’eeyis deeyo—”it is a fine evening.” The thrushes also sometimes speak the phrase nahutl-eeyh—literally, “a sign of the spirit is perceived.” The thrush first uttered these words in the Distant Time, when it sensed a ghost nearby, and even today the call may be heard as a warning.

Language existed long before writing allowed for its clinical dissection. The clumsy tumble of words we find in academic discourse is not the same poetic song we find in oral cultures. Language evolved with an appreciation for rhythm, sound, and flow; it evolved in a given ecology, among animistic foragers with a sensitivity to the rhythm, sound, and flow of the ecology they lived in. Language mirrored that ecology. Various forms of sound symbolism formed a basis for what a language would sound like; other, more abstract words might still have been chosen arbitrarily, but the field of choices was not wide open. Even abstract words had to sound like they belonged in the same language, and were still often confined by the synaesthetic experience, and thus, informed by the sights and sounds of the non-human ecology.

Human language, like the calls and communication of the other, non-human animals that share our ecologies, is formed by interaction with the world around it, not in a hermetically-sealed bubble of our own, arbitrary choosing. We’ve erected language as our “bulwark” against the thought that we might not be unique in the universe, the terrible idea that we might actually belong to this world and have a home in it, rather than being perpetually invasive, forever in exile from some lost Eden. What we have instead is simple deafness. The ecology we live in still speaks, we’re just deaf to it. We refuse to let it inform our speech, to teach us new words and melodies. It’s a conversation we no longer wish to enter. We’d much rather sit alone in the dark and talk to ourselves.