If you live in a bilingual household, you have probably wondered if your dog truly understands both languages, however this has always been a difficult question to answer, but following a scientific research in Hungary, it was concluded that your furry friend can actually distinguish between languages.
Scientists explained that dogs are able to recognize their owner’s native language and even foreign languages, after reading a series of brain scans from 18 different dogs, discovering that different areas of their brains would light up differently, depending on the language they were hearing at the time.
During the incredible study the dogs were read excerpts from Chapter 21 of ‘The Little Prince,’ including different breeds of dogs; six border collies, two Australian shepherds, a labradoodle, a cocker spaniel and three mixed breed dogs, with 16 of the dogs’ native language being Hungarian, while the other two were familiar with Spanish.
Their brain would react in a different way when they would hear a familiar language or a foreign language. “We found that they know more than I expected,” Laura Cuaya, a researcher at the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest shared.
The research also revealed that dogs are social learners, which make them adapt to different situations, and they don’t need “explicit training” to understand their owner’s language.