Former neuroscientist here. In grad school, I TAed for one of the profs who tried (and eventually renounced) to teach Nim Chimpsky language. I am well-versed in

Former neuroscientist here. In grad school, I TAed for one of the profs who tried (and eventually renounced) to teach Nim Chimpsky language. I am well-versed in this. For starters, we need to make a clear distinction between communication and language. Many animals communicate information to each other. But the hallmark of language is flexibility; the existence of grammar allows us to communicate novel sentences we have never spoken and others have never heard in a way that is clearly impossible with conditioning. Second, anthropomorphism is a big problem; It's why the field ultimately rejected the project to teach chimps language, and why they are dubious about language in parrots and dolphins. The evidence was, and is, relatively weak. Many researchers heard what seemed like language from chimps (e.g., Washoe's infamous "water bird" for swan), but when they analyzed Nim's total corpus, the connection between utterance and meaning vanished. Other than a few holdouts, the field largely concluded that all the chimp behavior observed could be just as easily explained with conditioning (utter that in this circumstance, get a reward, if no reward, try a new utterance, etc). Regarding the dolphins, I looked at the abstract of the original paper. Nowhere do they use the word "language", and the lead scientist also says they don't know if it's language. It's not clear why the Guardian article's author wants to argue for more.