Is Language Unique to Human Being?

This question is impossible to answer because there are so many possible meanings of “language”.

Animals make sounds, and animals communicate with those sounds. Is that language?

Some people define “language” as meaning “Human Language”, so it is roughly a circular argument such that “language” cannot possibly be anything but unique to humans. Whatever is unique about Human Language thus makes it distinct and unique. And we can all agree that Human Language is in some ways different from animal communication.

But there are so many ways to define language. Maybe we would say that it is a communication system embedded in a social structure that can have regional/social dialects. Actually, prairie dogs seem to have this and possibly some other animals too.

Maybe we could instead focus on how language is learned. And that is where most of the ‘human language is unique’ arguments come from. The main argument is that human language is too complex to be learned just from input (too many possibilities for how what we hear was generated, by some unknown mental ‘grammar’ we would have to guess), and that therefore language is somehow innate in humans, part of our DNA. Not all of it, not the words, of course, but the basic ability that allows us to ‘learn’ (actually ‘acquire’ is a better word) a specific language like English from input. Think of it as genetic hints we have that let us learn a language while other species can’t. On some level this is obvious as well, that we have a genetic predisposition to learn language: it’s natural for humans to do this, and obviously we have some biological support systems for it: our brains, our tongues (or hands, for signed languages), our ears (or eyes), etc. But the innateness argument goes farther than that to say that there is something uniquely linguistic in our genetic structure. And that’s still a widely debated topic, but a popular opinion among many linguists.

Other linguists would say that in fact human language is just an extreme form of animal communication. It’s got more words, more complexity, more social patterning, etc., but it has the same basic ingredients as animal communication, just more of it.

https://www.quora.com/Is-language-unique-to-human-beings