1. Displacement: human can describe things beyond space and time, however, most animals seem to communicate exclusively for this moment, here and now except bees, which can perform a type of dance to communicate other bees the moment they find the nectar.

2. Arbitrariness: there is no natural connection between a linguistic form and its meaning, except for onomatopoeia, compound words, etc.

3. Productivity: human can create some new expressions and novel utterances they have never seen before.

4. Cultural transmission: we may inherit physical features from our parents, not their language. We acquire language in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. This property exactly confirms the existence of LAD, proposed by Chomsky. First, if we are born in any country and then can speak the relevant language. Second, human infants, growing up in isolation, produce no “instinctive” language or vice versa. Third, without explicit instruction, babies can acquire language as long as they are in a specific community.

5. Duality: human language has two levels or layers simultaneously. For example, pit, its transcription /pit/, at one level, it has meaningless and distinct sounds, /p/, /i/ and /t/. At another level, a set of discrete sounds are combined to form a word, which is distinct in meaning.

Controversy

In the past, some scientists had been delving into language and animals, especially chimpanzee. They aspired to make sense how to make animals communicate with humans. As a result, chimpanzees communicate with a wide range of vocal calls, but cannot make human speech sounds because they lack relevant speech organs. However, the scientists tried to teach chimpanzees Sign Language or Symbols of Language. The first one, the chimpanzee was called Washoe. In the period of three and a half years, Washoe came to use signs for more than a hundred words, ranging from baby, banana and airplane to window, woman and you. The last one, one scientist attempted to train a chimpanzee called Matata how to use the symbols of Yerkish. Matata’s adopted baby, Kanzi, was always with her. Although Matata did not do well, Kanzi started to use symbols spontaneously with great ease. Of course, scientists do many prominent experiments to help chimpanzees communicate with humans, but I select the most impressive and convincing achievements to clarify my view. Eventually, the controversy concentrates on the process of teaching whether is called “using language” or not. I prefer the “using language” side and illustrate it through a graph.