What We Say When We Talk With Dogs
And what it tells us about an ancient relationship
“What is it about dogs that makes intelligent men, gifted women — great minds — look at them and say [in baby-talk voice], ‘Who’s a good boy? . . . Wooj a whajeejeeb?’”
– Stephen Colbert
In her fascinating book, Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond, Alexandra Horowitz, one of the world’s leading dog cognition scientists, begins a chapter about how people talk to their dogs with this quote from Stephen Colbert. Her aim in the chapter is to document the things people say to their dogs to shed some much-needed light on this little-explored area of cross-species communication.
In my field of research, sociolinguistics, we study the ‘social stuff’ people do with language: things like what social things motivate people to make the language choices they do, or how people use language to create social relationships with other human beings. But I also wonder about how people use language to build social relationships with non-human beings, like dogs.
There is a fair amount of research exploring how people talk about animals, for example, in different times throughout history…
