Do Chickens Speak a Language?

Chickens make a lot of different sounds, and every one of them means something, at least to another chicken. But do chickens speak a language?

Do they convey information in the same way humans do with words? Do chickens, like humans, use symbolic word-like sounds to refer to specific items? Do they name things?

Some biologists do describe the sounds chickens make in terms of human speech. They believe each unique sound a chicken makes either refers to something specific, like a hawk flying overhead, or sends a detailed message of one sort or another.

These scientists describe and name sounds in terms of the meaning they may convey. And they assume the structure of each sound is arbitrary and symbolic, like most human words.

As an example of the arbitrariness of most human words, nothing about the sound of the word “chicken” tells you what the word means, unless you happen to speak English. Similarly, “pollo” doesn’t connote “chicken” unless you speak Spanish, and so forth.

Because these scientists believe each sound refers to something specific, their approach to studying animal communication is sometimes called referential. Because they believe the sounds convey encoded information to be decoded by the listener, their method of study is also known as the informational approach. For these scientists, the chicken doing the talking rules the roost in terms of controlling communication.

So, Do Chickens Speak?

Animal behaviorist Chris Evans of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, has spent a lot of time studying chicken sounds. But he stops short of describing them as words. He is careful to designate them as calls or signals.

Yet Evans feels that chicken sounds — by conveying such information as the approach of a predator or the discovery of food — reveal a complex and sophisticated system parallel to human language. He recognizes three similarities between chicken talk and human language:

1. The ability to distinguish specific sounds (which he calls categorical perception).

2. The use of sounds to denote environmental events, such as the discovery of food or the approach of a predator (which he refers to as functionally referential).

3. The production of sounds for the benefit of a specific audience (i.e. a cock or a hen).

Evans does not, however, imply that chickens have a language comparable to that of humans. For one thing, they have an extremely limited vocabulary. For another, chickens don’t (as far as we know), discuss abstract concepts, or past or future events. They limit their communications to the present.

Language is Learned

Another significant feature of human language is that it must be learned. Mark Konishi is a behavioral biologist at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkley, he experimentally deafened chicks soon after they hatched. He found that the deafened chicks grow up to develop a normal repertoire of chicken sounds. They therefore could not have learned chicken language by listening to other chickens.

To investigate the potential that chickens might learn sounds from other chickens, Chris Evans studied the reaction of chicks to predator warning calls. Out of four groups of chicks, the only group with both predator experience and an opportunity to witness the anti-predator behavior of adult chickens responded normally to predators. Three control groups did not. His finding indicates that some degree of learning is involved.

So, do chickens speak a language? It certainly seems so to us humans. However, the current thinking among animal behaviorists is that chickens do not speak a language.

This blog was written in collaboration with ornithologist Gene Morton, author of Animal Vocal Communication.