The Bird Is the Word

Abstract

The idea that birds might have something related to language that humans also seem to have has gone full circle: After the developments of linguistics and psychology during the 20th century put the ‘uniquely human’ in the center stage, with the help of failed or misled language experiments with animals, it now seems that perhaps birds have something to tell us after all. Even though the study of our closest cousins still very much dominates the understanding of our own biological and behavioral traits and tendencies, current, cutting-edge theories of language evolution now give a great deal of importance to the study of birds and their vocal abilities. It is not the case of course that scientists nowadays think that birds have ‘human language’ (they don’t, as the reader will also have concluded, if he has ever been around birds and tried to have a conversation). Instead, what has happened is that recent developments in various fields have made the study of birds a perfectly fine component of any serious approach to