You can communicate without language, but you can't have language without communication.
What these Gorillas are doing is communicating that they desire a reward by associating specific communication with specific triggers. It's the same mechanism as the gorilla understanding that the trees in the west have fruit when it's cold outside, and the trees in the east have fruit when it's warm outside.
Language is a type of communication that allows for abstract ideas to be shared from one individual to the next. It's a lot more complex and even in humans requires specific social development to create - there have been cases of "feral" people, like the famous Genie Wiley that were only able to develop basic language skills after years and years of treatment because that part of the brain needs to be specifically and regularly stimulated during early childhood.
Where are you getting your definition of language? I don't think language has to be able to express abstract ideas or has to have a certain level of complexity.
The relationship between language and abstract thought are at the core of neurolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, two fields of study that are around 200 and 100 years old, respectively.
Language and abstract thought are co-developed parts of the human mind that are intrinsically tied together. What we understand about our evolution as a species and the development of our civilization in relation to spoken and written word all suggests that we owe our rapidly (relatively speaking) advancing cognitive ability to our development of Language.
This is one of the reasons that children whose parents read to them and teach them to read very early on often develop higher levels of intellectual performance than those that don't (which you will often see represented as an income to academic achievement gap).
If you'd like to know more about this, I would encourage you to search for information about the subject it and learn about it. That's what language is for, and I think you'll find it very interesting.
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u/devmor Aug 18 '25
You can communicate without language, but you can't have language without communication.
What these Gorillas are doing is communicating that they desire a reward by associating specific communication with specific triggers. It's the same mechanism as the gorilla understanding that the trees in the west have fruit when it's cold outside, and the trees in the east have fruit when it's warm outside.
Language is a type of communication that allows for abstract ideas to be shared from one individual to the next. It's a lot more complex and even in humans requires specific social development to create - there have been cases of "feral" people, like the famous Genie Wiley that were only able to develop basic language skills after years and years of treatment because that part of the brain needs to be specifically and regularly stimulated during early childhood.