Confronting Friends and Family

[Hovik]

I'm a nitpicker on that front. Had the same conversation with Summer recently. Studying an area does not make you a linguist, a scientist, a cook, an astronomer, etc. These terms apply to people who are defined by them, typically in a professional way.

From wikipedia: A specialist in languages, including translators, interpreters, and language teachers.

[...]

Anyway, to the more important subject. So, we are arguing that gorillas cannot use language? No matter whether she understands it or not, it is consistently referred to as language here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(goril...f_language At any rate, saying that animals cannot use language is a fundy thing to say.

I'm really not understanding what you mean about studying something doesn't make one something. I study linguistics in a university. As Annik said, I'm a few credits from a fully fledged degree in the subject, and it's an integral part of my day to day life. I write literature and test hypotheses like any other linguist. Moreover, I would define myself professionally as a linguist since that's what I do academically, and academia is my job. I am not a linguist in the sense of a translator, interpreter or language teacher. I am a linguist in the original and truest sense of the word; I am a language scientist.

In any case, whether you want to say I'm a linguist or not is really irrelevant. The fact of the matter is, my education and experience with the topic still makes me the most qualified individual on this forum (unless there's another linguist afoot with a MA or PhD that I don't know about) with regards to language and linguistics. That doesn't mean that "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong!" nor does it mean that I'm infallible. It simply means that I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about, especially when compared to the working linguistic knowledge of the layman.

And no, gorillas do not use language. There are several criteria that define what a language is, and simply repeating lexical items in a way that can convey vague meaning does not make language. It's definitely language-like (it has some but not all of the criteria that make a language) and linguistically interesting, don't get me wrong, but it does not constitute a full language. The usage of "language" by Wikipedia doesn't make an argument for it being a language, simply a convenient term to describe the fact that it's a rudimentary communication system that has interesting parallels to human language.

Animals don't use language, at least so far as we know up to this point. Many different studies have been done on the capacity of animals to have language, and none have satisfactorily met the requirements. There are several that have a few of the criteria (bee communication is actually pretty neat in that it has a few of the less-found aspects of language such as displacement), but no animal communication system meets all of the baseline requirements for it to be considered language.