• Question: Do dogs that are accustommed to one particular language, such as Spanish, would they understand a command that was said to them in English?

    Asked by tiegan to Alex, Ali, Kerry, Philip, Theo on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Alison Thomson

      Alison Thomson answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      No, they would only respond to commands in the language they’ve been trained in. Unless you start training them again in English!

    • Photo: Alex Pool

      Alex Pool answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Hi,

      This is a tough one, as there is some evidence that it’s actually the way you say the word than the word itself. So if you always say the word ‘sit’ in a certain way, then replace it with a different word (of the same length) in the same way then the dog will normally do the command. So the language and word doesn’t always matter, but more how you say it.

      Alex

    • Photo: Philip Ratcliffe

      Philip Ratcliffe answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Dogs don’t speak Spanish, or English or any other language, neither do they understand a language in the sense that we do. Using language means that not only do you have a certain vocabulary, but also that you have all (or ate least the most important) grammatical structures. In this way you can put words together in many different ways to communicate many different concepts. Dogs can’t do this (except in films and on TV). Dogs learn to associate certain sounds with certain actions. So you could, for example, say “bif” to mean “sit”, “baf” to mean “stay”, “bof” to mean “come”, “buf” to mean “roll over” and so on. But “bif”, “baf”, “bof”, “bof” and even a dozen, two dozen or more other “words” don’t make a language: try spending more than 5 minutes with someone using only “bif”, “baf”, “bof”, “bof” … to converse.
      That said, of course, if you used commands in Spanish then your dog will not recognise the equivalents in English, but you could still teach it the same commands in English.

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