Can Gorillas Talk? Can Gorillas Be Trained to Learn to Talk?

Vocally, gorillas can never learn how to speak any of the human languages. The only time we have seen apes speaking languages like English is in movies like Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but this is just fictional.

Some scientists like Francine Patterson believe that gorillas are intelligent enough to learn sign language. Pearson attempted to train a female lowland gorilla called Koko, which was born in the San Francisco zoo in 1971, and she believes that Koko was able to learn over 1,000 signs and mastered at least 500 of these at the age of ten (10) years. According to Francine, this was mainly through imitation and most of the signs which Koko learned helped her in requesting food and drink. However, other scientists did not concur with her on this because some of Koko’s presentations required further interpretation.

Perhaps it is wiser to leave the gorillas to their own language (a difference which we might not be able to change in the near future). Gorillas live happily in the wild and seem to comfortably speak a language they very well understand; and they deserve to live that way. A mere difference in language does not make them so different from us; there are many other similarities to compensate for the differences.