The Language
of Animals

A Scientific American Focus book, FIRST EDITION 1996, with a foreword by FRANS B. M. DE WAAL of Emory University. ISBN 0-8050-3839-6; paperback 0-8050-3840-X as an Owl Book. Thirteen chapters work outward from cephalopods, honeybee dances, spiders, fish, frogs and birds to cetaceans, cat and dog families and monkeys, before turning the question back on itself in “Can We Talk?” and “Threads from a Tangled Skein”. It sits in a linguistics collection as the comparative case: what animal signalling can and cannot tell us about the nature of human language.