Animal Languages
Animals use far more elaborate and complex language than we think. They chat, gossip, mourn, rhyme, speak in dialects and make jokes. Whales sing a different series of songs each season, which rhyme and are picked up by other whales in passing, making them ‘hits’. Some species of bird have dialects that differ from one region to the next, and the birds that live on the regional boundaries are bilingual.
Non-FictionPrint
Original title
Dierentalen
Author
Eva Meijer
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Bursting with facts and empirical research, 'Animal Languages' offers a valuable insight into the complexity of language and communication and the difficulty of researching animal languages.
Athenaeum.nl
Eva Meijer
Eva Meijer (b. 1980) is a writer and philosopher. Their extensive oeuvre, which includes the international bestselling novel Bird Cottage (2016), is much praised in the international media. Meijer received the Erasmus Dissertation prize for The Soldier Was A Dolpin: On Polical Animals (2017) and went on to garner the Halewijn prize for their literary oeuvre, and the Hypatia philosophy prize. Their work frequently addresses language and politics in the animal world. Meijer currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, writes essays and columns for Dutch newspapers and is a member of the Multispecies Collective.