We already know that and life didn’t change because of it.
When Roger Payne popularized whale songs it had a tremendous affect on the lives of whales. He is directly responsible for the existence of many whales, and even reversed some species’ trajectory towards extinction. That was without even decoding the meanings of their songs, just by making it known that they had songs and making it possible for many people to hear them. If the languages of many different types of animals were decoded, I think that the world may be a very different place.
I thought it was demonstrated already that dolphins, birds, and orcas at least, have structures within their communications that pretty clearly indicate that there’s a language there (e.g. syntactic structure and a lot of sea creatures having “names” and nicknames and etc). It’s not surprising to me… adaptively it’s a pretty strong advantage if your species has the ability to support it, and making complex sounds for no reason doesn’t sound like a sensible thing for a creature to do. I think it’s just people’s strong human-exceptionalism that makes them think that real language is a humans only thing.
Yes, for sure a whole lot has been learned about whale and dolphin languages, including some having self identifying sounds, both on individual as well as group levels. They also have hierarchical languages and combine sounds like we do in sentences, but also they combine sounds over top of each other similar to what beatboxers do.
I absolutely agree, human-exceptionalism causes such a blind spot in modern societies attitude towards animals. It would be so amazing to see this blind spot go away.
