The Common Denominator of Language

The controversies about whether animals do have language are because we're using the word language in a common sense in a rather loose way. Other animals definitely have signaling systems, but they don't have hierarchical organization where one part of the sentence depends crucially on another and allows us to see dependencies between actors and people acted upon. The other thing we have is recursion, that is, we can take a sentence and embed it within another sentence, and then we can do that iteratively. So you and I have an infinite generative capacity. That's not available to other animals.