A more accurate question is “can humans understand canid languages?”
Every time one of these “revelations” come out, it’s met with surprise and disbelief. Meanwhile, any empathetic three year old can probably deduce that the noises dogs make to each other probably have some meaning.
Meanwhile, some people keep trying to tell us that non-human animals don’t have the capacity for things like communication and emotion.
The researchers in the documentary do state that it is clear that dogs can communicate with humans and have emotions, they are instead investigating if dogs are capable of more complex methods of communication, such as the ability to inform, ask questions, or narrate. It’s explained more in this section of the doc.
So? Can they?
The research in the documentary shows that some particularly intelligent dogs, when presented with new tools that allow for construction of sentences, seem potentially capable of productivity (linguistic term). More research is needed to confirm if they are actually performing it. They are also capable of understanding categories of objects by how they are used without explicitly naming them, and are able to retrieve the correct object based on that category.
So the answer to the question in the title is “We don’t know yet. Research is in process.”
Yep
