🦜 More Than a Tongue: Why Animals Do Not Speak Like Humans

The Perpetually Curious!

🦜 More Than a Tongue: Why Animals Do Not Speak Like Humans

Originally published: November 2026

Canonical source: https://www.theperpetuallycurious.org/articles/why-animals-cannot-talk/

A parrot says “hello” from the next room. For a moment, you expect a person to step through the doorway. How does a bird with a beak produce something so familiar? You might expect a macaque, with lips and a tongue more like ours, to come closer to sounding like us.

There is a difference between making a sound, learning to copy it, and using it to say something new. Speech is one way to express language. People can also use signed languages, with their own grammar. In either case, familiar words or signs can make a new message, from a request for water to a story about an imaginary place. The mechanics of making a sound are easy to hear in the small change that turns one vowel into another.

The word itself may be familiar, yet the deeper question lingers beyond it.
Across forests, oceans, grasslands, and skies, living creatures exchange signals shaped by bodies, senses, and lives very different from our own.
Perhaps the greatest lesson in listening is not hearing ourselves reflected back, but learning to hear another voice on its own terms.

🗣️ What a vocal tract can do

On a single breath, “ee” can turn into “oo.” Air from the lungs sets the vocal folds in the larynx vibrating while the tongue, lips, and jaw help shape the space above them. Much of what we hear as a change of vowel comes from a change in the shape of that space.

Researchers used X-ray video to see what shapes the vocal tract could take in living long-tailed macaques as they called, moved their faces, and ate. A computer model built from those shapes produced distinct vowel-like sounds. The researchers argued that the tract could support a wider range of speech sounds if the animal could control it differently. The monkeys provided the shapes. The model made the speech-like sounds.^[1]

Even with that range of shapes, the quality of the underlying vibration matters. Compared with other primates examined, humans lack thin extensions of the vocal folds called vocal membranes. Experiments and models suggest that losing these membranes may have helped make human voicing steadier.^[2]

🧠 How the brain shapes speech

A steady sound is just the starting point for a spoken word. The tongue can start moving toward the next sound while the current one is still audible. Recordings from the human brain during speech show overlapping patterns of activity linked to the lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. What sounds like a single word to a listener is a sequence of finely timed movements for the speaker.^[3]

The importance of that timing becomes clear when planning the movements is difficult. Certain variants of FOXP2, a gene that helps regulate the activity of other genes, can cause a disorder whose core feature is childhood apraxia of speech. People with the condition have difficulty planning and sequencing the movements of speaking.^[4] A parrot faces a related challenge when it learns to turn a sound it hears into movements it can repeat.

🦜 How a parrot learns a sound

Some parrots can change the sounds they make based on what they hear, an ability called vocal production learning. A parrot makes sound with its syrinx, an organ near the point where the windpipe divides toward the lungs. Its tongue can help shape the sound.

Researchers recorded brain activity as four budgerigars, a kind of parrot, made calls and song sounds. In a region involved in vocal control, some neurons were more active at particular pitches across those sounds. This resembles how parts of the human brain organize features of speech sounds. In the zebra finches studied, the corresponding region showed a different pattern of activity.^[5]

A familiar sound can also become a learned label. In Irene Pepperberg’s experiments, an African grey parrot named Alex used labels for color, shape, and material to say how two objects were alike or different. If color was the feature they shared, “color” was the answer to what was the same. He could also answer “none” when the question asked about a similarity or difference that was absent.^[6] Pepperberg could choose what to ask Alex. In the wild, researchers often begin with the sounds themselves and look for a pattern they can test.

🐋 What a signal does for its listener

Humpback whales learn songs from other whales. Researchers studying recordings identified recurring sequences and found a pattern in how often they appeared. A few occurred often and many occurred rarely. Units of human language, such as words, often follow a similar pattern. The study tells us about the organization of the song. To ask what whales take from a particular sequence, we would need evidence about how they respond to it.^[7]

In Botswana, researchers studying communication in African wild dog packs could look for a visible outcome. Would the pack set off after gathering? Departures were more likely when the researchers heard more sneeze-like sounds during the gathering. When a dominant dog started the gathering, departures tended to follow fewer of those sounds.^[8]

Sometimes the question is which animal a call is for. Low rumbles are part of how elephants keep in touch when they are out of sight of one another. In a playback study, African savanna elephants called sooner and more often in response to recordings of calls originally directed at them than to calls from the same caller directed at another elephant.^[9]

👂 What we hear when we listen

The parrot says “hello” again. A sound with the shape of a human word made us turn toward the doorway. Now we can ask how the bird learned to make it, when it uses it, and what happens when someone hears it. The questions that follow can keep us listening long after the word has faded.

Pass this article along to someone curious and let the learning travel.

↗️ Let the question travel

Share this piece with someone who would pause at the doorway with you.

Educational context

Here, speech refers to the vocal expression of language. The animal studies describe specific species and settings, and the evidence can differ for a sound, a learned label, and a listener’s response.