Animal Linguistics”…A Conventional Knowledge from B.C. is About to be Overturned! The amazing contents of the world’s first study started by a “Doctor of Bird Language” at the University of Tokyo.

Associate Professor Toshitaka Suzuki, who discovered “that animals speak language” through his research on titmice

Many people have probably wondered if animals talk just like humans, or if they could talk to animals using Doraemon’s honyaku konjaku.

This April, the University of Tokyo launched a study that could be a major step toward this goal.

The founder of the world’s first “Animal Linguistics” as an academic discipline is Dr. Toshitaka Suzuki, a “bird language doctor” who was the first in the world to discover that wild birds speak. He served as a specific assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Hakubi Center until last year, and became an associate professor at the University of Tokyo’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology this fiscal year. It is an extremely rare “feat” for a single researcher to establish a new field.

He has spent the last 17 years of his life in the forests of Karuizawa, “spending six to eight months of the year in the forests from sunrise to sunset every day, watching birds,” an unimaginable life of research.

When they see a hawk, they make a “baboon” sound, and when they see a snake, they make a “jar-jar, jar-jar” sound… The titmouse uses its “language” to warn its friends of danger.

As the subject of his thesis at university, Mr. Suzuki focused on the titmouse, a species of wild bird with a complex call, and has continued his research ever since. He says that even as a master’s student, he began to think that the titmouse might have something in common with human language.

It has been a common belief that animals other than humans do not have language,” he says. For example, it has been thought that when a dog woofed or yelped, it was just an expression of feelings, such as anger or joy, to show their emotions. Human babies begin to speak words with specific meanings, such as “daddy,” “mommy,” and “boo-boo (car),” at about one year of age, and generally begin to speak two-word sentences at one and a half to two years of age. The ability of grammar to produce complex sentences in a flexible and limitless manner is another human characteristic.

In fact, since the time of Aristotle in B.C., it has been believed that only humans are special creatures with language, and that animal noises are merely emotions. And so the human vs. animal dichotomy was born.”

Suzuki’s research began when he questioned the stereotype that “only humans have language” and “only humans are special,” which had been believed by scholars around the world from ancient Greece to the present day.

The titmouse’s call conveys its meaning to its friends around it,” he said. For example, when they see a hawk, they make a “baboon” sound. When they hear this call, they look up as if they are looking for a hawk. When they hear the “jar-jar” sound they make when they see a snake, they carefully search the ground and bushes where the snake might be hiding. Moreover, they respond in the same way when I make them listen to a recorded voice.