Non-Human language

Question

Is it possible for an intelligent species to have a language based on making a whistling sound through a hole for breathing located on their side? What is the plausibility of this? Anatomy for reference

Answer 1

Ostensibly, a species can make a language out of anything. Bioluminescent signals, movements, using vocal chords, or by whistling. All a language is is a sequence of signals that can be interpreted; there's no reason that whistling can't work too.

Answer 2

Morse Code

You can make a language out of anything. Even if your can only whistle a single note, you can always alternate between "on" and "off" to produce a dot-dash pattern and replicate Morse code. You can say anything in Morse code. It just takes a long time.

Your animal has a specially designed whistler and a specially designed listener, to hear many different notes. So you have a dot and a dash for each different tone of whistling. That should speed up the language considerably.

Answer 3

It depends, but likely only simple / basic tool intelligence

The relationship between language and intelligence is intensely studied. The key in this question is the word 'intelligent'. Depending on what metric you use to measure this, the answer is it depends.

For Simple Biological Intelligence: It is observed that many species on Earth today exhibit 'intelligent' behaviours. 'Intelligent' biological behaviours could be any of the following:

• The ability to perceive the world around them, and react and adapt to changing circumstances
• The ability to form social groups, have social hierarchy, ability to communicate with each other

In this category - one may place dolphins and octopi. Their communication through 'clicks' and body behaviours, with limited bit (or information) rates. It has been demonstrated that Bees use 'dance' to communicate the location of a nearby food source, albeit slowly and over some time.

Tool Intelligence: This is behaviour that shows the following:

• The ability to manipulate objects in the environment to accomplish goals
• The ability to attain greater goals by learning tools

Some birds have been known to use their beaks to exhibit this behaviour, and obtain food by the use of tools. They communicate with bird whistles and fairly low-bit rate language. Monkeys are known to use stones, rocks and bones to open nuts. It is likely you do not need complex language to form this kind of intelligence.

Technological Intelligence: This is the most complex form, and can be shown by:

• The ability to investigate and understand rules and laws of the environment, and then create building structures, industrial processes and machines that in turn can manipulate the environment using this understanding
• The ability to transmit complex information across generations, such that each generation can improve successively, and create more complex societies over time

The only animals we know of to create Technological Intelligence are humans. Our language sound is quite complex, having the ability using tonal shifts, guttural and non-guttural utterances, a large pitch and dynamic range with our finely tuned vocal cords that allow us to transmit complex information quickly.

In addition, grammatical structures allow mutual understanding, and the ability to permanently record and write our language into a physical medium allows information to be cross cultural and cross generational, which is thought to be essential for technological intelligence.

So in summary, there are more ways to communicate than just sound, but if the language cannot be complex it is likely to achieve simple or tool intelligence. If you want technological intelligence, a complex language that can be translated to a system of writing would likely be needed.

Answer 4

You may want to look into whistle languages here on earth. There are a whole bunch of them that all work a little differently, which could provide inspiration not only for how such a language could work, but even how a diversity of languages among a species with this morphology could work. In our own world, whistle languages tend to arise from spoken languages, essentially whistling out the tones or stress (depending on if your language has stress or tones) that would mark the syllables of the spoken work. An example most people are familiar in english is the way to say "I don't know" that generally just involves shrugging and grunting the stress pattern of "I don't know".

Tonal languages like many indigenous american and east asian languages, will have whistle variants based on tone, while stress languages like most in europe will have whistle variants based on stress patterns. Tonal languages tend to produce more complicated whistle variants with greater flexibility, owed to the fact that each given syllable in a tonal language can have a lot of tones, while a given syllable in a stress language is, basically, just stressed or not stressed.

Good places to look for inspiration would be Yodelling, the Turkish "bird language", indigenous american languages like the whistle variants of Piraha or Zapotec, and whistle languages common in east asia like whistled Bai in China or whistled Hmong in Myanmar. If you can make a variety of sounds and combinations, you can make a language from it.