Recent research into the linguistic capabilities of birds by Dr Kentaro Abe and Professor Dai Watanabe at the University of Kyoto has provided new evidence that birds have the ability to process syntatic rules. This ability is innate and spontaneous and has challenged the idea that only humans have the capacity to understand language.

Just as humans aren’t born with the ability to speak in structured sentences, birds are not born with the ability to sing their songs. They have to learn to sing their songs.

Some people including Noam Chomsky the linguist and activist believe that there is a kind of Universal Grammar (usually credited to Noam Chomsky) which can be found in all languages, and researchers who have been studying bird song have also found that these similar kinds of universal patterns that can be found in human languages can also be found in bird song.

There is a certain order of language that makes sense, and a certain order of language that does not make sense. For example, take this sentence, “I will go to the beach today”. You can say “I will go to the beach today” or you can say something like “today beach I will go” and it makes sense, but if you say, “the go today beach will I to”, it doesn’t really make sense, there is kind of a block in our minds when we try to read the last sentence.

This is something to think about when learning languages, we all talk in a fairly similar way even though our languages on the surface may seem quite different, for example we say things about where we are going, when we are going, what we are doing, what time we are doing it, what we like and what we don’t like etc. At the basis of languages is real communication. If we remember that when if we are learning a language and a culture that seems very different to our own, that

it’s good to remember that under the surface all humans communicate and express things in a real way that is common to all of us. 

This can keep us from feeling daunted when we are learning a new language.

All people share similar dreams, hopes, fears and challenges in their lives throughout the world and express those feelings and ideas in real communication. So even if you are starting out learning a new language, remember to focus on the real communication of what you are trying to say rather than trying remember fancy complicated sentences that sound good but communicate little.

Going back to the scientists who studied birds, what they did to show that birds also appear to follow certain grammar patterns when learning song, is they played different combinations of random bird vocalizations to the birds and what happened the birds when learning new song processed the sounds they were learning and put them in some kind of structured order when they started singing the song they had learned, and what’s more they found that these structures and orders were similar and tended to match the kinds of patterns we find in human language.

The scientists also found that when they studied the brains of the birds, that the same parts of the brain that light up when humans are processing language also lit up in the birds when they were singing their songs.