Question: Do think that animals will ever be able to fully understand and possibly even speak the human language?

Nadine Lavan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

I would say probably not for a long time (who knows though what evolution will come up with in a few million years!). There have been attempts to teach primates, who are our closest ancestors in evolutionary terms, how to use human language. Kanzi, a bonobo and Koko, a gorilla are famous examples. Researchers have tried to teach Kanzi a language with a keyboard with many different symbols on it and Koko was taught sign language. These two primates certainly have learnt a lot of different signals and seem to be using them a lot (to make demands about food or toys) but there are doubts if they are using language in a creative way, through making up new and never heard before messages – and that’s one of the hallmarks of human language use.

As for speaking the human language, there are a lot of anatomical constraints: human vocal tracts differ in a number of ways from the vocal tracts of even our closest ancestors. We, for example, have a lot more control over what we do in our voice box (or larynx) than other primates. We also seem to have a lot of space in our mouth due to a domed palate – that is thought to allow us to articulate all the different speech sounds with our tongue (try say ‘t’ versus ‘k’ – your tongue should move quite a bit to produce these two sounds!). Most other animal don’t have this much space available in their mouth, which could potentially stop them from producing human-like noises.