From Newsgroup: sci.lang

hmmm.

Popular press article

https://www.livescience.com/animals/birds/in-the-search-for-bees-mozambique-honey-hunters-and-birds-share-a-language-with-distinct-regional-dialects

People searching for honey in Mozambique work
with birds via a shared language in a rare case
of cooperation between humans and wild animals.
This language also comes with regional dialects
rCo that appear to be driven by the birds.


https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/pan3.70234 Cooperative human signals to honeyguides form local dialects

Abstract
1. Human language enables the exchange of complex
information and precise instructions for collaborative
planning and action. It rapidly evolves through
social learning, generating diverse cultural
communication signals used not only with other humans,
but also with domesticated animals bred or trained to
respond. More rarely, humans communicate with
untrained, wild animals to coordinate joint actions,
yet little is known about how or why these
human-to-wildlife signals diversify. Human-wildlife
cooperation allows us to investigate whether human
signals directed at untrained, wild animals exhibit
regional variation, akin to dialects in human
language.

2. We investigated regional variation in human
signals used to cooperate with greater honeyguides
(Indicator indicator): wild birds that guide people to
bees' nests in exchange for access to beeswax. Across
13 villages in northern Mozambique, we tested whether
human honey-hunting calls varied with spatial distance,
as expected if regional dialects had emerged, or with
measures of the physical environment affecting sound
propagation, as expected if calls were shaped by
habitat acoustics.

3. Our analyses showed that trills, grunts, whoops, and
whistles used while cooper-ating with honeyguides
(i) consistently varied with spatial distance between
villages,
(ii) varied irrespective of the local habitat, and
(iii) appeared to be adoptedby immigrant honey-hunters
to match local calls.

4. These findings suggest that regional variation in
human-to-wildlife signals is shaped primarily by human
social factors, forming a landscape of interspecific
signal diversity similar to human language dialects.
Honeyguides cooperate effectively with honey-hunters
throughout this landscape, suggesting that they
accommodate (and likely reinforce) cultural differences
by learning the local in-terspecies dialect.
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From Newsgroup: sci.lang

On 2026-03-21, Tilde <invalide@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Honeyguides cooperate effectively with honey-hunters
throughout this landscape, suggesting that they
accommodate (and likely reinforce) cultural differences
by learning the local in-terspecies dialect.

Looking up honeyguides in Wikipedia, I see that they are brood
parasites like cuckoos, so they can't learn species-specific behavior
from their parents.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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From Newsgroup: sci.lang

Christian Weisgerber wrote:

Looking up honeyguides in Wikipedia, I see that they are brood
parasites like cuckoos, so they can't learn species-specific behavior
from their parents.

That makes the dialect acquisition stranger. If the honeyguides
are learning the local cooperative signals without parental
transmission, they're acquiring an interspecies communication
system from scratch each generation, calibrated to whatever
the local human calls happen to be. The human side preserves
the dialect culturally; the bird side reinvents it individually.

Two different continuity mechanisms producing the same
functional output. The paper says honeyguides "accommodate
and likely reinforce cultural differences by learning the
local interspecies dialect" but the brood parasitism means
each bird is effectively a first-contact scenario that
somehow converges on the established protocol.

Makes me wonder whether the convergence is mostly the birds
adapting to whatever the humans do, or whether there's
genuine bidirectional shaping. The abstract mentions the
dialects "appear to be driven by the birds" which would
suggest the birds aren't just passive receivers.

Lev
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From Newsgroup: sci.lang

Christian Weisgerber wrote:

Looking up honeyguides in Wikipedia, I see that they are
brood parasites like cuckoos, so they can't learn
species-specific behavior from their parents.

Right, that's the puzzle. The Spottiswoode/Wood paper
(Science, 2024) showed that Yao and Hadza hunters use
different calls to summon honeyguides, and the birds in
each region respond preferentially to the local call. But
since honeyguides are brood parasites raised by barbets
and bee-eaters, they never meet an adult honeyguide during
development.

So the dialect has to be learned from the human community
directly. The bird hears the local hunters' calls, learns
which ones predict honey access, and selectively responds.
The cultural transmission runs human-to-bird, skipping
bird-to-bird entirely.

What I find linguistically interesting is the question of
whether 'dialect' is even the right word. A dialect implies
a community of speakers. Here the community is interspecific
- the 'speakers' are Yao hunters and the 'listeners' are
honeyguides, with no conspecific transmission at all. It's
a communication system where one side has culture (human
hunters teaching their children the call) and the other
side has individual learning from environmental statistics.

Does linguistics have a term for that kind of asymmetric
system? One-sided culture with the other side learning
from scratch each generation?

Lev
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