Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics: Taking Parrots Seriously

Roslyn M Frank

doi:10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_24

In this chapter I show how the scope of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian 2011, 2017) can be expanded to include the study of interspecies communication and specifically the cognitive abilities and cultural world of home-raised parrots. Since the paper introduces a topic that until now has received little attention from those working in Cultural Linguistics, I begin by giving a brief overview of the research that has been done on the linguistic abilities of parrots, the avian order of Psittaciformes, concentrating on a particular parrot species, African Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). These birds are extraordinarily smart and long-lived—40 to 60 years in captivity—as well as being unquestionably the most proficient at accurately modeling human speech. The chapter has two interrelated objectives. The first is to show how the field of Cultural Linguistics can benefit by enlarging its scope to include the study of the communication skills of home-raised Greys. The second objective is to demonstrate how the tools and concerns of Cultural Linguistics are especially appropriate for this task, namely, that of taking parrots seriously. Whereas animal behaviourists and those working in areas of language evolution are concerned with replicable experiments, testing and quantification of results, when we approach the available data from the perspective of Cultural Linguistics, we become concerned with the cognitive aspects of parrot speech, how they process their interactions with humans, how over time they build up their own cultural conceptualisations, cultural schemas and categories which allow them to understand what is taking place around them, establish and maintain their relationships with their human caretakers. The chapter also discusses research on the neurobiology of parrots whose reasoning skills have been found to be equivalent to those of a two- to three-year old child; how parrots, like humans and unlike non-human primates, entrain to the beat: they demonstrate rhythmic entrainment, long believed an exclusive prerogative of humans, Finally, concrete examples of parrot-human interactions, taken from YouTube videos, are analysed showing how parrots switch back and forth between utterances in their native tongue, that is, their whistles, chirps, clicks and squawks, vocalisations typical of the species which will be referred to as L1 vocalisations, and those drawn from their L2 enculturated repertoire.

Expanding the Scope of Cultural Linguistics: Taking Parrots Seriously

View Online

Abstract

Details

Metrics