Dialects are not exclusive to humans, and naked mole rats also speak "dialects". ｜Science
The author | Richter
There are about 6,000 languages in the world, but just as species have gone extinct, languages are dying out very quickly, with an estimated average of 2 languages disappearing every month.
In fact, not only the language, but also the environment of "speaking Mandarin and writing standard characters", the number of people around us who can speak an authentic dialect is becoming increasingly rare. However, scientists have found that a magical little creature called a naked mole rat is very fond of speaking "dialects." They communicate efficiently in dialects and use them to distinguish between themselves and outsiders, maintaining ethnic cohesion.
The study was published in the January 2021 issue of the journal Science.
Magical Naked Mole: Ugly, but cooperative
If there is a contest of ugly selection in the animal kingdom, the naked mole rat must be on the list. The biggest feature of the appearance of the naked mole rat is "naked", except for a few long hairs that perceive the state of the surroundings, which are completely light and wrinkled. They live underground for almost their entire lives, and in order to adapt to this dark environment, their eyes are extremely degraded, and the iconic front teeth of the rodents protrude outwards, which is extremely ugly.
What makes naked mole rats really unique, though, is that they are highly social social animals with great cooperative skills. The naked mole rat population is organized like bees and ants, with a fat queen rat and several male rats, and the rest are both male and female worker rats, specializing in collecting food, keeping warm for the queen of the mouse, digging tunnels, etc.
For social animals, the most important thing is communication, or you yours and I do mine, don't you mess around? The animals then developed a wealth of means of communication.
Many mammals and birds, including us humans, communicate through sound. Some animals can also use ultrasonic and infrasound waves for ultra-long-distance communication, such as elephants using their paws to perceive the vibrations generated by other elephants several kilometers away, and whales and dolphins "chat" with their counterparts dozens of kilometers away through their calls. Sound is a medium that is fast and less affected by obstacles.
Some animals are more naked "visual" animals. For example, the gorgeous bird of paradise will perform a very complex dance during the courtship process, and the peacock jumping spider will raise its abdomen and hind feet to swing left and right, showing its bright colors like a peacock opening the screen, attracting the right person.
(Left) Courtship dance of gorgeous birds of paradise and (right) peacock jumping spiders. ｜Tim Laman/Macaulay Library，Jurgen Otto
In addition, there are animals like ants that use their antennae to sense the chemical signals emitted by their counterparts and communicate through their sense of smell.
So, how do naked mole rats maintain effective communication with their own kind?
The "social" secret of naked mole rats
Naked mole rats live in pitch-black underground caves, where vision is almost useless and scents are transmitted at a limited distance, so sound becomes the best medium.
In the latest study, scientists tracked 166 naked mole rats from seven different populations over two years and recorded 36,190 different calls they made. After analyzing the characteristics of these sounds, they found that in each population, naked mole rats transmitted information among group members by emitting soft chirping sounds. What's more, naked mole rats create unique "dialects"! The calls of naked mole rats of the same population have the same tone, distinguishing them from other groups.
Do naked mole rats really speak dialects? Will they also be like humans, seeing their fellow countrymen and tearing up their eyes? The researchers devised ingenious experiments to find answers.
They created a "prop" that connected three caves by a pipe, leaving a naked mole in the middle of the cave and playing the cries of other naked mole rats in the left or right cave. It was found that if only one side of the cave had a call, the naked mole rat would run down the pipe to the crying cave; if there was a cry on both the left and right sides of the cave, it would give priority to running to the cave that emitted its own ethnic dialect. That is, naked mole rats not only speak dialects, but also respond preferentially to the dialects of their own ethnic groups.
Naked mole rats not only speak dialects, but also prioritize the dialects of their own ethnic groups. ｜Colin Lewin
In fact, animals that speak dialects are not just naked mole rats. Scientists have long found that birds and mammals in different regions also have different calls, although this difference is not large enough to affect the communication between each other. Ants that are also highly social will release the unique "smell" of their own ethnic groups, if they smell the smell of their fellow villagers, they will greet each other kindly; if they smell the smell of foreign ants, they will decisively turn away, and once the other party forcibly talks, invade the territory, and even fight at the expense of the hand.
Ants release a unique "smell" that belongs to their own ethnic group, distinguishing themselves from outsiders. ｜wordpress.com
Humans are keen to pursue the standard unity of language, but why do animals like to speak in tongues? The study of naked mole rats may be instructive.
Why do naked mole rats like to speak in tongues?
The habitat of naked mole rats is often very poor, and even the roots of the plants on which they depend are very rare. In the dark and cold underground world, they look around dazedly, not knowing where the next meal will be, and can only dig up willfully. However, digging a cave is not like walking on flat ground, the energy consumption is 3500 times higher, if the naked mole rats act alone, I am afraid that they will play over before they can find food.
So they cleverly turned to the power of the group. A naked mole rat colony can contain 300 members, and if you dig in 100 directions at the same time, the probability of blind rats hitting the rhizome is greater, so that everyone can share food for mutual benefit. With such painstaking efforts to find food, unable to make a dowry for others, naked mole rats become extremely xenophobic, creating unique dialects to distinguish their kind, and if they hear a foreign accent, they are quickly expelled.
In addition, dialects may also be a powerful tool for the queen rat to maintain her rule. The queen rat is the largest and strongest individual in the naked mole rat population, often using force to suppress group members. It will inhibit the fertility of other individuals through pheromones in the urine, and will also let the workers eat their own feces, transfer estrogen out, and make the workers happy to take care of the offspring for the queen.
New research has found that the queen mouse also controls the entire population by calling. It is the chattering language violence of the rat queen rat that prompts the entire population to form a unique "dialect". It's as if your boss is a Northeasterner, and before long you'll be brought out with a northeastern flavor. And, like human languages, this dialect is cultural, not genetic. Dialect cohesion is influenced by the rat and will change with the change of the mouse. If the baby naked mole rats are strayed to other ethnic groups, they can also learn a foreign accent.
Like human language, the dialect of the naked mole rat is cultural, not genetic. ｜Felix Petermann, MDC
Like naked mole society, dialects enhance cohesion between people. UNESCO has an idea that only in its most familiar mother tongue can it accurately express the deepest and most complex emotions of people's hearts. In Wu and Cantonese, eating is called "food", chopsticks read "箸", "rain" is "falling rain", eggplant is called "falling Su", these elegant ancient pronunciation condenses the local history and culture, and pins people's deep feelings for their hometown.
Although in today's highly information-based era, the reduction of dialect differences and the expansion of the influence of Putonghua are inevitable trends, we should not easily abandon our own dialects, after all, the protection of dialects and the promotion of Putonghua are not opposed, bilingual, bilingual, multilingual can also be a very natural thing.
Editor| Chen Tianzhen
Resources:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6528/503
https://www.mdc-berlin.de/news/press/naked-mole-rats-speak-dialect
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