Can You Teach an Old Dog a New Language?

While on an evening constitutional this past week, I passed a family walking their dog. As I strolled by the family, I overheard them speaking in more than one language. The children were babbling on in English, playing with each other and chatting with their parents. The parents were speaking to each other and their children in what I guessed to be a Chinese dialect.

That got me thinking about the dog.

One of the great things about dogs as pets is that they learn and obey commands. “Fetch”, “heel”, “sit” and “rollover” can make for hours of playful interaction between a dog and his owners. I imagine that over time, a dog can learn the meaning of those commands in different languages, especially if the dog lives with multilingual owners.

But what happens when a dog is owned by a monoglot AND that monoglot moves to a place where the owner’s native language is not the common dialect? As the dog interacts with people and other dogs in that new home, does he (the dog) suffer the same sort of confusion that we humans suffer when confronted by people who don’t speak or understand our native tongue?

Consider the following scenario at a dog park:

Our fun loving dog, who understands only English, recently relocated to Nuuk, Greenland with his owner, George. On their first weekend in Nuuk, George takes his faithful friend down to the local dog park. Not a shy dog, George’s four legged pal quickly falls in with the other dogs playing there.

Suddenly an owner on the far side of the field starts yelling in Danish: Hvem vil have en godbid?

All the local dogs, who of course understand Danish, run towards the offer of a treat. George’s poor dog is left to wonder what the heck is going on. Is there a fire? Did I say something wrong? What the heck does ‘Hvem vil have en godbid?’ mean?!? Man, I knew this whole ‘move to a country where I don’t understand the language’ was a mistake!