Recently there's been a lot of buzz about new chatbots that can have a conversation

almost like a human. But there's a big difference between being human-like

and actually being human.

To really get what it means to be a sentient communicator,

we need to consider what separates the way humans talk

from the way both animals and machines communicate.

Grammar girl here, I'm Minion Fog Fog Fog Fog,

Fog, your friendly guide to the English language.

Stick around because after we talk about why animals and chatbots don't do the same thing with

language that humans do, I'll talk about the tricky way Americans use the word gotten and share a

listener's funny follow-up story about the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Human language is incredibly complex and constantly evolving.

It's quite frankly amazing how it can convey not just literal information, but also subtle hints about the speaker's

attitude, perspective, and emotions.

While animals and plan for the future, and reflect on the past, all while also changing up the way we talk to be appropriate in different contexts.

What makes us special is the way our internal language system is shaped and changed by our

social identities and relationships. This is why speech quirks like vocal

fry, discourse markers like like, you know, and I mean, and debates over pronouns like

he, she, or they are the very things that make us different from animals and machines.

No one would deny that our fellow creatures in the animal kingdom can communicate about

basics like where to find food, where danger lurks, and who in the neighborhood is smelling good.

But what they usually lack compared to humans is the ability to create new combinations of expressions in ways that go beyond something

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