We’ve heard all kinds of wild claims about animals and language.
So what are we to make of a new finding that young goats start to bleat like their peers? Is it crazy? Or could it reveal something about human language?
Linguist Daniel Midgley does it for the kids on this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
You can listen to all the episodes of Talk the Talk by pasting this URL into your podlistener.
http://danielmidgley.com/talkthetalk/talk_classic.xmlShow notes
An introductory article
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9085654/Goats-can-develop-their-own-accents.html
The story, according to the “60-Second Science” podcast — with actual goat sounds!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=upbleat-finding-kids-start-to-sound-12-02-15
The actual article (paywall, Elsevier)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347212000401
We’ve seen animal “accents” before — here’s that silly BBC “cow accents” story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5277090.stm
But it’s not so strange to vocalise like your peers. Birds do it.
Google docs link
Whales do it.
http://www.livescience.com/14197-sperm-whale-language-accents.html
Even New Yawkers do it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_dialect#Consonants
But why do we have accents?
http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/accent.cfm
