The difference between words and language is important in animal research.

Errors, and creativity, are key to language use.

Three features can help distinguish between language and just words.

A flurry of admonishments erupts from two parents nearby, and I turn to see a small child half-naked and rising from a squat on the gravel path. Pull your pants up! they say, pull your shirt down! as the child tries to parse these two at once in his moment of need, and it reminds me of a class I teach where we talk about what counts as language, and what is just words.

In the 60s and 70s, when people rearing chimpanzees in their homes were setting out to prove that our differences were really just a matter of environment, a kind of territorial push-back arose from the behavior science community doing something similar, and definitions flew of what might be the various forms of intelligence. Many animals, of course, through the millennia, have understood human vocabularies. Bring those ewes around to me, shepherds have said to their dogs, or Go sit over there.

But these might be distilled simply to individual words, which really are just sounds, and not unique to us at all. EWE. SIT. That, basically, is what the blue jay on my patio is saying to whoever she’s dealing with. And actually, the shepherd I met in Ireland last summer was cutting to the chase by just using a whistle to put on a pretty good show for those of us gathered in the little observation booth beside his field.

One vital feature that distinguishes language and just words, argue those invested in these matters, is........

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