The Intricate Connection of Birdsongs to Human Language

By Erika Schelby

Birdsongs have inspired poets and lovers, becoming one of the philosophical focal points in ancient Greece and Rome. They have also led to several long-ago debates about the relationship between birdsong and human language.

“A robust body of evidence accrued over approximately 100 years demonstrates striking analogies between birdsong and speech, both learned forms of vocalization,” states the Royal Society journal.

Some thinkers have argued that humans are the only rational animals since they have a language, unlike nonhuman animals. Yet bird communications through melodious songs sound very much like a language, casting doubts on these views. No nonhuman animals other than birds, specifically songbirds, display such fine musical articulation and use these communication skills among their species.

“Humans and songbirds share the key trait of vocal learning, manifested in speech and song, respectively. Striking analogies between these behaviors include that both are acquired during developmental critical periods when the brain’s ability for vocal learning peaks,” adds the Royal Society article.

The Philosophical View on Songbirds

Aristotle, a philosopher and scientist educated at Plato’s Academy, first systematically studied birds and all other known living creatures. In addition to his other works, he wrote the monumental History of Animals (the original title in Greek was the more modest Inquiries on Animals). It remained the authoritative source for Western zoology until the 16th century.

Aristotle asked the questions of what and why. He already knew, ages ago, that birds learn their songs. In History of Animals, he states:

“Of little birds, some sing a different note from the parent birds, if they have been removed from the nest and have heard other birds singing; and a mother-nightingale has been observed to give lessons in singing to a young bird, from which spectacle we might obviously infer that the song of the bird was not equally congenital with mere voice, but was something capable of modification and of improvement.”

In particular, parrots may be able to closely mimic the human voice due to the use of their tongue. According to popular opinion, in ancient Greece, parrots didn’t produce melodies but had a semi-human voice and could learn Greek. Aristotle didn’t buy it. According to him, only humans had logos [reason] and the ability to use language to communicate. What parrots did was simply mimicry. Fast-forward to the poignant story of “Humboldt’s talking parrot.”

In 1799, during his explorations along the Orinoco River, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt “stayed with a local Indigenous Carib tribe near the isolated village of Maypures,” located deep in the Venezuelan jungle. The Indigenous inhabitants kept tame parrots in cages and taught them how to speak. But among them was one bird that “sounded unusual.” When Humboldt asked why, he learned that the parrot had belonged to a nearby enemy tribe who were driven from their home village and land. The few surviving members fled to a tiny islet perched between the river rapids. It was there where their culture and their lingo endured for a few more years until the last tribesman died. The only creature “who spoke their language” was the talking parrot.

Fortunately, Humboldt transcribed the parrot’s vocabulary phonetically in his journal. This helped rescue a portion of the vanished tribe’s language from extinction.

Today, some linguists accept this story as a metaphor for the vulnerability of languages, with one lost every 40 days. Still, skeptics wonder if the tale is accurate. Whatever the case may be, Humboldt himself reports in the second volume of his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804, published soon after his return to Europe, about his stay with a group of natives in an isolated village beside a waterfall on the Orinoco River:

“A tradition circulates among the Guahibos, that the warlike Atures [another tribe], pursued by the Caribs, escaped to the rocks that rise in the middle of the Great Cataracts; and there that nation, heretofore so numerous, became gradually extinct, as well as its language.”

This animal-supporting mindset has stood against the rise of Christianity, which held that all other beings were created to serve humans and their needs. Consequently, the Church favored the side that regarded animals as irrational. Therefore, Aristotle governed supreme in religious teachings, philosophy, and scholastic learning within universities until the arrival of the 16th century.

Despite the belief that animals were inferior to humans, people had their own ways. Songbirds were widely liked and were memorialized thanks to the great poets of the Middle Ages. Both the French Provencal troubadours and the German and Austrian Minnesingers cherished singing birds and, above all, nightingales. These are a few lines from Walter von der Vogelweide, who used a last name that means “of the bird meadow:”

“Besides the forest in the vale

Tándaradéi,

Sweetly sang the nightingale.”

According to legend, the poet left a will requesting that the birds at his tomb be fed daily.

The Language of Animals

In the second half of the 18th century, the philosophical focus shifted from the age-old argument that nonhuman animals lacked reason to a serious study of animal language. German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder’s 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language asserts that “these groans, these sounds, are language” through which the animals communicate. Even if nonhuman animals are not rational, they have, for example, the language of pain. For human and nonhuman beings, “there is a language…which is an immediate law of nature,” Herder adds.

Hein van den Berg, an assistant professor from the University of Amsterdam, published an excellent paper on these developments in 2022. He writes, “Herder affirmed that each animal species has a distinctive language.” And that especially includes songbirds.

In addition, Herder endorsed sympathy and empathy as qualities that may enable interspecies communications. Humans don’t understand what animals say, and animals do not comprehend human concepts and speech. But this can be surmounted by Einfühlung, slipping into the nonhuman being’s skin to understand how it feels. It is like “walking in someone’s shoes.” It is a word Herder invented. Perhaps birdsong is so beloved by humans because it enables this feeling to resonate instantly and naturally. A person usually reacts to a singing bird with spontaneous and joyful emotions.

Interestingly, Herder’s work on empathy almost certainly provides the foundation for the Seattle Aquarium’s empathy-themed programs. The aquarium fosters empathy for wildlife, develops teacher resources, offers empathy fellowships, operates an empathy café, conducts empathy workshops in Seattle and around the country, and holds biennial conferences.

Arthur Schopenhauer, frequently dubbed the philosopher of artists and pessimists, was one of the earliest supporters of animal rights. He was blunt about his views in his book The Basis of Morality:

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”

Hindu philosophies and Buddhism greatly influenced Schopenhauer, who respected and supported animals. He was also prescient, anticipating current conditions by writing, “The world is not a factory, and animals are not products for our use.”

While philosophers have emphasized birds and their songs, what did scientists, researchers, ornithologists, and regular bird lovers learn about birds’ origins?

Evolution of Birds: The Scientific Perspective

Amazingly, our beautiful birds started as not-so-handsome dinosaurs. The evidence shows that they emerged from theropod dinosaurs during the Late Jurassic period, some 150 million years ago. The Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin displays the most complete specimen of Archaeopteryx, regarded for more than a century as the oldest bird fossil from the transitional phase of evolution from dinosaur to bird. Resembling a raven, the fossil was unearthed in 1860. An additional 12 fossils, most with imprints of feathers, were discovered afterward. All of them came from the Solnhofen Limestone formation in Bavaria, Germany. In recent decades, however, a few different small and feathered dinosaurs were excavated in other locations. These may, likewise, have a role in the story of the evolution of birds.

Songbirds are a suborder of birds, specifically of perching birds called passerines or oscines. There are more than 4,000 species, all of which have a unique vocal organ: the syrinx.

The songbirds can execute various tasks and performances with their vocal organs. They use short, practical calls to communicate details about

Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico. She is a contributor to the Observatory. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute