The marine biologist David Gruber recently told the New York Times that he and his team had managed to decipher a kind of alphabet of sperm whales, and that this alphabet was also accompanied by a whale-specific version of words. If this is true, then Gruber's particular research interest is understandable: deciphering these words, this language that is inaccessible to us, with the help of artificial intelligence. The biologist is hoping for nothing less than a new Copernican revolution, "the realisation that we are not the only beings with a rich inner and communal life".

Language requires conscious understanding

There is no question in today's research that animals and even plants communicate with each other. But whether the exchange of information that takes place should and may actually be called language continues to give rise to controversy – with people sometimes getting quite emotional about the issue. Matthias Erb from the Institute of Plant Sciences at the University of Bern, a specialist in the effects of plant scents, has made a clear decision in this regard: “I never talk about 'language' in connection with plants, I don't use the word.” For him, language is a “complex communication system”. The communication part, yes, he allows that that also applies to plants. This basically just requires a transmitter that “sends” information in order to trigger something in the recipient. Consciousness is not necessarily required on either side.

Espionage instead of cooperation

Erb's reticence is not only due to philosophical considerations. He still remembers the “talking trees”, a popular science phenomenon that took an all too rapid and rather unfortunate turn towards the esoteric in the 1990s. “This put a halt on our field of research for almost 20 years; communication via scents was a taboo subject.” Erb is therefore rather critical of the fact that communication among trees is currently experiencing a small renaissance thanks to the work of bestselling author and forester Peter Wohlleben and his "Wood Wide Web" . In general, the scene has a tendency to thoroughly misunderstand some signal paths. You often hear the example of trees “warning” their neighbours through chemical signals when a pest infestation occurs. Erb has a completely different view of this process: this would actually put trees  at a competitive disadvantage, “I would rather call it espionage”. Finding out about the infestation of the neighbouring tree would therefore give the neighbour a knowledge advantage that the originator of the signal would have preferred to avoid. For this reason, Erb is convinced that this is not a deliberate act of communication; nature finds ways to make the best possible use of information, regardless of any intention to send it. It is good at it, you could say it is in its nature.

«Trees don't use chemical signals to warn their neighbours of pest infestations - I would rather call it espionage.»

- Matthias Erb

Communication, understood in this rather broad manner, can take surprising forms. The colour of flowers, for example: for Erb, there is definitely something like an “intention to send information”, even if it only manifests itself evolutionarily, over long periods of time. The colour pigments are produced explicitly for this purpose, which reminds him of the scent molecules he investigates in his research. However, in order to be able to call this “language”, the biologist believes that conscious understanding is required. And here we would probably still be rather cautious in general: who would be prepared to attribute consciousness to plants?

Language models merely generate character strings

In the meantime, the issue has become rather muddled in another, related area: who would be prepared to attribute consciousness to machines? After all, they are proving that they are now capable of language. GPT and its consorts, who have only been around for a good five years, deliver texts in all tones and for all situations with an almost rage-inducing naturalness. Tobias Hodel, Professor of Digital Humanities at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg since the summer of 2025 and a specialist in texts and artificial intelligence, insists on a small but crucial difference: “large language models produce text, not language.” He calls what an AI generates character strings, meaningful sequences of “tokens”, as they are called in technical jargon. But there is still something missing for it to be deemed proper language, Hodel believes. The language model only pretends to produce language. And what about us? We are only too happy to accept the illusion. Hodel calls it “positionality”, our access to language is always linked to a “social and cultural experience”. Language is therefore not simple, it is always received by a certain entity, and this is undoubtedly a detail that is of little interest to language models in their stubborn and zealous reproduction of patterns.

«Our access to language is always linked to a social and cultural experience.»

- Tobias Hodel

So is there a fundamental misunderstanding here? Erb is also bothered by the fact that we make use of human concepts to describe something that has little to do with human language. The biologist believes that we are also using projections. The primary aim should be to “understand nature better”, and he sees no reason why a forest should function in a similar way to a human community: “trees are completely different to us, they don't have a central nervous system, it all works in a 'wonderfully modular' way.” Unfortunately, this line of thought only leads further down the slippery slope when it comes to language models: could it perhaps be that we are not projecting anything into the machines at all, because we – oh shock! – function in a similar way to these famous neural networks? That our brain black boxes harbour similar secrets to the AI black boxes, of which no one can say exactly how they do what they do? What if our language, in essence, is nothing more than “strings of characters”, if our thoughts are magically “produced” when we speak, as Kleist once described it?

Is the world made of language?

When it comes to such distinctions (or indistinguishability), we inevitably end up reaching for the dusty old philosophical tool box at some point. We find ourselves once again facing big questions that have long been considered obsolete, or at least are hardly discussed in recent philosophical discourse. Is the world made of language? Can we even gain an understanding of the world beyond language? The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was categorical on this point: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” And can we really define consciousness – and its relationship to language – clearly? One thought experiment among many, again using the example of colours: language models could speak very eloquently about colours, but they could never gain a real understanding of “blue” or “green”, it is often said, because they lack the sensory experience to do so.

This, though, is an argument that blind people must see as an affront – they also have a multifaceted understanding of colours and gain it through language. Ask yourself what proportion of “world knowledge” you have acquired yourself and what proportion you have acquired indirectly through language (be it in conversations or through texts). It is therefore only logical that Silicon Valley started talking about “reasoning models” a year or two ago. With language comes the ability for machines to reason, as if by magic – Hegel would not necessarily have disagreed. But Hodel does: “all these promises, general artificial intelligence (AGI), reasoning, that ultimately comes from advertising language.” This is also not without strange logic: language also potentially always means manipulation, deception and exaggeration. Silicon Valley may just be falling for its own magic tricks.

Linguistically gifted animals that can express what they want

Either way, we are currently experiencing a strange and, for many, disconcerting moment in human history. Our position of “human exceptionalism” is being contested from two sides. Are we the only living beings that can speak? And what if machines are suddenly more than just “stochastic parrots”, as an influential paper from the Google ethics department puts it (a publication which earned the author Timnit Gebru no thanks, but a termination of her employment)? Is language still suitable as a distinguishing feature? As what ultimately sets humans apart? The question can also be turned around to the most pragmatic definition of language: it is the tool that only people have at their disposal. It is what shapes us, our interactions, our knowledge, our emotions. We may be animals, but we are the linguistically gifted ones.

This has been the axiom for centuries in the history of philosophy, and no one really dared to seriously object. Linguist and Director of the Institute of Linguistics, Linda Konnerth, puts it this way: “human languages are communication systems with which we can express everything we want to express.” This includes, in particular, fictional or long-past events. It is not just about exchanging information, but also about emotions, attitudes to what is being said and the fact that “we often want to remain vague and not communicate everything explicitly”.

More than an evolutionary advantage?

There is no doubt that language represents an evolutionary advantage. What is in doubt, however, is where this advantage lies exactly: is it the ability to coordinate and divide up foraging and other tasks? Or to strengthen the relationship between children and parents? And did the development of language really run parallel to the development of sapience? It is also debated whether animal sounds are intentional communication or simply an expression of alarm or fear. Meerkats, for example, easily become so excited that they emit their warning call even when no other meerkats are nearby. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, curb their alarm calls when they see that the group has already spotted the danger.

«Human languages are communication systems with which we can express everything we want to express.»

- Linda Konnerth

 In any case, once the language was there, it proved to be a success story. It spread and diversified: “there are around 7,000 languages in the world today,” says Konnerth, and not all of them are documented. This is why a lot of research is being carried out in general linguistics on indigenous minority languages far away from the political centres; the University of Bern is establishing close cooperation with universities in the Global South in order to sustainably expand basic linguistic research.

Researching languages before they disappear

And language is dynamic. New language forms are still emerging today – sociolects, contact varieties, Konnerth calls them. But more is needed before you can call it a new language: the language form must be used for all purposes and passed on as the native language. In this respect, another dynamic is much more significant: “in general, the number of languages is falling rapidly.” The reasons for this are an increase in communication infrastructure and the resulting language contact. It is obviously that the socio-economic interest of parents to have their children grow up with a national language or other majority languages, which increases the pressure on minority languages. Estimates suggest that a quarter of today's languages will no longer be spoken by 2100 and that the rate of language extinction is likely to triple. It is therefore a race against time: “the main thing is that we want to understand how different languages are and how these differences develop.”

Viewed as a whole, today and in evolutionary terms, “small” languages with up to 100,000 speakers are the norm and therefore of particular interest to linguists. In this respect, Switzerland is a small paradise for a linguist, with all its living dialects. Konnerth thus sees an ethical dimension to her research. She recalls, for example, indigenous North American languages, which can be “revitalised” thanks to linguistic documentation due to their significant importance for the descendants of these speaker communities.

Researching languages with the help of AI

Konnerth also sees great potential in the use of AI – but for the time being, the technology is mainly helping with the more tedious, routine tasks in research. Because linguists primarily work with spoken language, the bottleneck lies in transcribing the audio recordings, and this is where AI is getting better and better. This is where Konnerth and Hodel's approaches are similar. For the AI expert, automatic text extraction also represents a “huge opportunity”. Literary research projects could now deal with unimagined volumes of text, “we can suddenly analyse 5,000 books instead of 50”. However, he is still a little cautious when it comes to the future hopes of language models: at the moment, specific AI models are still better than the general models, and as a researcher you also have to ask yourself what it costs to train and operate such giant models, “also ecologically”. In this respect, for him the use of language models is also a “question of decency”, especially for a literary connoisseur. It's also about an awareness of how many different text genres and tonalities there actually are – not just the “plastic texts” spewed out by the machine. And he compares it to furniture handmade by an artisan carpenter versus IKEA mass-produced products. Hodel is convinced that this is ultimately not a bad thing for the humanities and that they will become more relevant: “after all, it is the domain of the humanities to make it clear how different kinds of knowledge stand in the world.”

Protection against language?

Matthias Erb also expects positive developments for his field of research: there will certainly be some breakthroughs in the next few years, especially at the molecular level. The mechanisms still need to be investigated, for example on the receptor side: how exactly do the fragrance molecules get into the plants, where do they dock, what happens next? Research may primarily uncover chemical phenomena and abstract correlations, but Erb is aware that it also has to deal with language – and that a little caution is always required, especially when “selling” the results: “human language has its limits, of course, but we have to use it to communicate our results effectively.”

Which brings us back to language and manipulation, a topic that we are currently grappling with in connection with fake news and the vulnerability of democracies. In this context, linguistic competence also means competence with fact and fiction. The fact that anything can actually be told, that we also love being told something, leads Hodel to wonder whether we might need “protective layers against language” – “because now we realise how impressionable we are”. But doesn't language always reflect its own limits and ambiguity in a playful way? A unique moment on the beach, a beautiful experience that will stay with us forever: we find it “indescribable”, and that itself is the best description.

Words that decay like musty mushrooms

At the beginning of the 19th century, Kleist put an optimistic spin on it in his essay “On the gradual formation of thoughts during speech”: “language is then no longer a fetter, like a brake on the wheel of the mind, but like a second wheel on its axis, running parallel to it.” A hundred years later, Hofmannsthal wrote in the Chandos letter: “I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything. [...] the abstract words, which the tongue must naturally use in order to express any kind of judgment, decayed in my mouth like musty mushrooms.” Language as the wheel that keeps the cart turning, versus language that is forever in our way – words that decay like musty mushrooms: there is no better way to illustrate the great rift that language means to us. If you want to boil this topic down to a more concise form, please contact the language AI you trust.