Beyond Simple Alarm Calls

For a long time, the scientific consensus on animal alarm calls was that they were relatively simple. A vervet monkey might have one call for “danger from the air” (like an eagle) and another for “danger on the ground” (like a leopard). This is impressive in itself, demonstrating that the calls carry specific meaning, or semanticity. But the research pioneered by Professor Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University revealed that Gunnison’s prairie dogs operate on an entirely different level of complexity.

Slobodchikoff and his team discovered that prairie dogs don’t just have a generic “predator”! call. Their warnings are tailored to the specific threat. Through careful recording and analysis using sonograms (visual representations of sound), they identified distinct calls for different predators. For example:

• The call for a coyote is different from the call for a badger.
• The call for a hawk is different from the call for a ferret.
• They even have a distinct call for humans.

Crucially, the prairie dogs’ reactions change based on the call. A hawk warning sends everyone diving for the nearest burrow entrance. A coyote warning, however, might cause them to stand on their hind legs, watch the predator, and retreat to the safety of their burrow rims, keeping an eye on the threat. This isn’t just a reflexive scream; it’s a transfer of specific, actionable information.

Painting a Picture with Sound

This is where prairie dog communication moves from merely complex to utterly astonishing. Slobodchikoff’s most groundbreaking experiments involved testing the descriptive power of these calls. He and his students walked through a prairie dog colony wearing different colored shirts (blue, yellow, green, gray) and being of different heights.

The results were staggering. By analyzing the sonograms, they found that the prairie dogs weren’t just saying, “Human”! They were adding modifiers. The internal structure of the call—the frequencies and harmonics—changed in consistent ways. In essence, they were constructing sentences. A call might translate to “Tall human in the blue shirt approaching quickly”, while another could be “Short human in the yellow shirt standing still”.

They could describe:

• Size and Shape: “Tall” versus “short”, or “thin” versus “wide”.
• Color: They could reliably distinguish between different shirt colors.
• Speed of Travel: They had variations for whether the object was moving quickly or slowly.

To push this further, the researchers introduced novel objects the prairie dogs had never seen before, like a large, black oval silhouette being pulled through the colony. The prairie dogs, after an initial period of confusion, created a brand-new, consistent call for this strange new “predator”. This ability to coin new terms for novel objects is known as productivity or generativity—one of the key hallmarks of human language.

The Building Blocks of a Language?

So, is this “prairiedogese” a true language? To answer that, linguists often turn to a set of design features proposed by Charles Hockett. While human language possesses all of them, other animal communication systems exhibit some. Prairie dogs tick some very important boxes:

• Semanticity: The calls mean specific things (coyote, human, blue shirt). Check.
• Arbitrariness: The sound of the call for “coyote” has no inherent connection to a coyote itself; it’s an abstract symbol. Check.
• Productivity: The ability to create new messages, as seen with the black oval. Check.
• Displacement: This is the ability to talk about things that are not present in space or time (e.g., “what we did yesterday” or “the coyote that was here last week”). This is a major feature of human language, and there is currently no evidence that prairie dogs possess it. Their calls are rooted in the here and now.

The absence of displacement is a significant distinction. We can tell stories; prairie dogs, as far as we know, can only report the news. However, the presence of semanticity and productivity, combined with their ability to combine elements (nouns like “human” with adjectives like “tall” and “blue”), demonstrates a system far more sophisticated than previously imagined. It’s what scientists call a system of “referential communication”, but one with a stunningly complex, combinatorial syntax.

What This Means for Our Definition of Language

The study of prairie dog communication challenges our comfortable sense of human exceptionalism. We often draw a firm, bright line between the cognitive abilities of humans and those of other animals, with language being the ultimate dividing wall. Slobodchikoff’s work suggests this wall might be more of a steep, graded hill. Other species may be on the same continuum of communicative complexity, just at a different point.

This research opens up incredible possibilities. Slobodchikoff himself has worked on developing AI-powered software to translate these calls in real time—a potential “prairie dog-to-English” dictionary. If we can decode the vocalizations of prairie dogs, what about dolphins, crows, or elephants? We may be surrounded by complex conversations that we have, until now, dismissed as mere noise.

The next time you see a prairie dog stand tall and let out a sharp chirp, pause and listen. You aren’t just hearing an animal sound. You are hearing a detailed report, a description of the world, and a message to its community. You’re hearing a vocabulary in action, a dictionary of the prairie being written on the wind.