What Does a Dog Say?

Why don’t dogs talk? Well, who said they can’t? Owners and pet lovers enjoy teaching their dogs new tricks. A favorite pastime for many people is watching dogs’ mannerisms and adding their own narration to the scenario to personify the animal’s behavior and thought process. We all have our favorite memes or YouTube videos with these examples to answer our question ‘what does a dog say.’  😉

Dogs are smart animals and bring us so much joy. With the evolution of dogs as pets, it’s no surprise that they have the capacity to understand human words! Have you ever stopped to think just how many words your pooch can understand?  Or even more mind-blowing, how does your dog communicate with you? Let’s look at basic communication skills. 🐶

Communication Modes

Everyone, human or furry, can communicate! Communication happens in many different modes. There are receptive and expressive modes.

👂🏼 Receptive- meaning what is understood.
🗣 Expressive- meaning what is communicated.

There are also verbal and nonverbal modes.

👄 Verbal- meaning spoken words, phrases, or sentences.
🧍🏾‍♂️Nonverbal- meaning gestures, body language, eye gaze, or facial expressions.

Putting all these together, receptive skills mean understanding verbal and nonverbal modes of others. Expressive skills mean communicating one’s thoughts and ideas both verbally and nonverbally. As you can imagine, dogs fall more into the category of nonverbal communicators, both expressively and receptively.

Understanding nonverbals

Just like humans, dogs read nonverbal cues. They can follow an eye gaze (i.e., look where you are looking) and a point (i.e., look where you are pointing). Dogs can understand gestures, such as patting your lap or the sofa to indicate they can sit there.

Dogs can also understand a routine. Try quietly grabbing your keys, shoes, and coat and sneaking out the door. Chances are they are already at the door waiting for you, tail wagging.

In humans, understanding routine is a pre-linguistic skill. There is a social aspect to reading nonverbal cues around routines. With the example above, one must remember that a person with keys, shoes, and a coat represents leaving the house (or getting into a car). There are also usually words associated with a routine. With this same example, some words might be go, let’s go, outside, car, keys, or come on to list a few.

 Receptive language

Have you ever thought about all the words your dog knows? Research shows that the average number of words a dog understands is 89 (I have seen a wide range though). Here is a short inventory of commonly known words among canines:

Come	Walk
Sit	Bring
Stay	Ball
No	Leave it
Bad dog	Treat
Good dog	Speak
Their name	Release
Roll-over	Wait
Down	Bed
Up	Potty

What other words or phrases does your dog know? Let us know in the comments below!

Intonation

Intonation refers to the rise and fall of pitch to convey meaning (i.e., sarcasm, anger, happiness, humor). Like humans, dogs process intonation separately from words. Meaning, even if they are not familiar with a word, they can decipher your tone and emotion. Yes, dogs can tell if you are being mean or genuine, even if they don’t yet know the words you are using.

When you pair familiar words with tone and nonverbal cues, dogs have a very keen sense of what to expect. Some research shows that a dog’s receptive language is around that of a two-year-old human!

Their communication

So, dogs may not be able to speak but they do communicate their thoughts and ideas often! They communicate through gestures and body language. For example, they may bring a toy to you to indicate they want to play, paw at their food bowl to indicate they are hungry or wait by the door to indicate they want a potty break. Of course, some dogs’ behaviors are more subtle than others.

It’s amazing what dogs can do! How does your dog communicate to you and what do they tell you? Let us know in the comments below.

References

https://www.sciencealert.com/dogs-respond-to-an-average-of-89-unique-words-experiment-finds