A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Yes, because they communicate with natural behavior (I'm blanking on the word here. It's behavior they were simply born with)
Language is learned, but you can still "understand" another human if they are angry, crying, or laughing, no matter where they are from.
Innate behavior
body language
A lot of dog social skills and communication is learnt, rather than preprogrammed. I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of regional dialects immediately. There would be a lot of commonality, but plenty of room for mismatches remain.
"instinct"?
Attila Andics leads the lab where the study took place and said researchers were looking for brain regions that showed a different activity pattern for one language versus the other.
"And we found a brain region — the secondary auditory cortex, which is a higher level processing region in the auditory hierarchy — which showed a different activity pattern for the familiar language and for the unfamiliar language," Andics said.
"This activity pattern difference to the two languages suggests that dogs' brain can differentiate between these two languages. In terms of brain imaging studies, this study is the very first one which showed that a non-human species brain can discriminate between languages."
- Is your dog bilingual? A new study suggests their brains can tell languages apart
A little more:
… Mallikarjun said it would be worth investigating whether dogs could differentiate between languages in behavioral studies, too.
"Whether they would behaviorally show a difference between Spanish and Hungarian, or whether this is something more subtle ... because often with neural studies, you can find differences that don't play out in the behavior."
Now, the dogs in the Hungarian study were trained not to move during the sessions, so the scientists could focus on the brain images and not their physical reactions.
But Andics said you should be able to try a version of this test at home, too.
"Start talking to your dog in a language they have never heard," he said. "They will probably look surprised."
Fun fact: all dogs speak English, because Americans do not give a fuck about social customs.
German dogs are incredibly well-behaved. They're stringently trained and trusted to stay put when told, to the extent that owners routinely take them shopping, and leave them just inside the front door, where they will wait patiently and mind their own business.
Unless they hear someone speaking English. Then they get all wiggly and worry about getting caught, because they know Americans will give them scritches and tell them they're cute.
They ARE cute, and deserve to know!
Yes that's human language, but what about dog language?
Yeah!
Oh they certainly do look weird at you when you talk in a different language, no doubts! But the meme asks if the dog would notice a different language of "barks" rather than human speech.
Fun fact: Cows have regional accents.
möö
Shazooooooo
Username checks out.
So do crows, btw.
For example, a crow from the south might say "yee-caw" instead of "caw-caw"
And wear tiny cowboy hats.
Wüf!
So that's funny, but you know what I seriously find to be very strange? How different the onomatopoeias for a dog's bark (well, any common animals sound) are in different languages. Here are the ones I know from experience, done kinda phonetically in English: American English: woof woof Brazilian Portuguese: ow ow (au au) Farsi: hop hop
Don't forget Ruff Ruff
Right! I was just doing it out of memory, but there's many other weird ones. I was looking this up many years ago after an Iranian friend told me it's hop hop there. I remember that for dog, rooster, and I think maybe also pigs and cows, there was wide variation across the world. But for cats, meow was really consistent across most languages. I might be wrong, it's been a while.
Le Barque!!
Børk
It's actually 'ouaf'
The answer is yes btw (except for trained commands)
I assume this is because their communication is based on posture, look and pheromones?
I was wondering if ducks would understand each other, with them having confirmed to have accents based on region