Excerpt from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Although birds' calls are much like the innate cries of primates (which, like human laughter or cries of pain, need no practice), their songs are different in kind. Songs come from culture, not biology alone. They must be rehearsed, like the babbled sounds of human babies, and a young bird's warbling only gradually takes on the shape of its parents' songs. A songbird raised in isolation produces poor, distorted versions of its native songs. If raised by foster parents of another species, many birds can learn their parents' foreign songs (whereas honeybees, following the dictates of their genes, can only dance the dance of their biological parents).

For birds, as for children, love is an accelerant for learning. Fostered birds can learn the alien songs of their nurturing adoptive parents, but if the same songs are piped in over a loudspeaker, the birds do not learn to sing them any more than a child learns to speak a language from television.

Like human language, birdsong selects its own society. Some scientists have raised young female European starlings in a sparse community composed only of adult males and other young females. Preferring the company of their peers, the young birds copied the songs of their less adept friends rather than the virtuosic songs of the adult males—a result poignantly familiar to some fathers of adolescent girls.

And, as with humans and their language, time is cruel to the musical brain of a bird. Quick to absorb the patterns of song in youth, a bird's talent for learning songs erodes with age. Older birds hearing birdsong for the first time are like adults who come to a new country, knowing they will never speak its language as flawlessly as their children will.

Perhaps we are so enraptured by birdsong because we recognize its connection to us. In our evolutionary family tree, we're like the black-sheep musician descended from a long line of tone-deaf ancestors who are baffled by our obsession with rearranging sound. We feel ourselves unique, out of place, misaligned with our heritage. But then we discover that one of our very, very distant cousins is also a musician. Somewhere back in deepest time, a shared ancestor provided the genetic material for our musical life, our language love—genes that have lain dormant in many of our relatives but that have flowered on a few select branches.

Like human infants, birds recognize the songs of their own species from birth. Scientists can measure this by the quickening tempo of nestlings' hearts and the urgency of their begging upon hearing a shift from foreign songs to native ones. But unlike us, our bird cousins live in language's liminal, meaningless space throughout their lives. Their strand of language-music never intertwines with meaning.

As far as we know, even birds that can sing hundreds of different songs do not sing to offer advice, enact laws, make promises, protest their leaders, admonish their young, or do anything resembling the conversion of symbol into sound. Yet, unlike most of our mammalian relatives, they do not dismiss song as useless. All this intricate, rehearsed arrangement of sound exists for the sole purpose of revealing themselves. Birds use song much as mammals use the more primitive signal of scent. From the complexity of their songs, prospective mates and rivals can discern the singers' health, their intelligence, the reach of their territory, even how well they have kept parasites at bay. They sing: Here I am. Know me.

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At the public library, a man is blaring music from his computer. A staff member walks over and asks him to turn it down. He erupts: Why do I need to turn it down? I'm only playing my music to drown out the sound of all these people in here yammering in all these languages. Why don't you tell them to turn down all their languages?

It seems to me I've watched this scene before. A man I know suspects that the people speaking Chinese on the bus are talking about the other (non-Chinese) people on the bus, with impunity. His suspicion is fueled by the fact that a Chinese person he knows once admitted that sometimes Chinese people do talk about those around them, confident they won't be understood. This strikes him as offensive.

Excerpted from Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.