In deciding if it is only humans that are capable of real language, or the ability to communicate in a meaningful way, we need to compare human language with animal communication. There are many weaknesses attempting this comparison mainly because of the lack of total understanding of animal communication, however, one way was suggested by linguist Charles Hockett who set out to specify the various "design features" which characterize language. The features which seem to capture the crucial nature of language include use of the vocal-auditory channel, arbitrariness, semanticity, cultural transmission, spontaneous usage, turn-taking, duality, displacement, structure-dependence, patterning and creativity. The idea then, is to discover if these design features are also present in animal communication. The majority are or at the least there is insufficient evidence to decide otherwise. There are three however which are rare or absent in animal communication.
Firstly, displacement or the ability to refer to a far removed place or time, such as talking about what happened last year to our sister at the carnival, appears to be a unique design feature of human language. Except for some examples found in research done with bee communication, where the worker bees could communicate the location and distance to find nectar to other bees, the degree of displacement was far less than found in human language.
Next is the use of structure-dependence or the ability to automatically recognize a certain group of words and change them to other words to have the same meaning. An example could be - [THE YOUNG BOY WHO WAS WEARING A BLUE JUMPER] [HE] [GAVE THE DOG A BONE] these groups or chunks can be rearranged to [A BONE] [WAS GIVEN TO THE DOG] [BY THE YOUNG BOY WHO WAS WEARING A BLUE JUMPER]. There is nothing to suggest that animals use structure-dependent operations in their communication and as such we consider this another design feature unique to human language.
