★ Integrating perspectives from philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science, this work offers a comprehensive interpretation of the essence and impact of language.
★ From animal language to digital language, it explores the historical evolution of language and its potential influence on the future.
★ It analyzes the differences in communication between humans and animals, revealing how language shapes human nature and social interaction.

We are linguistic beings, halfway between animals and machines. That which defines us has a history. And it is likely to have a future.
This book explains the three forms of language –animal, human and digital – in a rigorous but clear perspective, between evolutionism, neurosciences, linguistics and computer science.

Language is a technology that has profoundly changed the environment around us and us human beings ourselves. Pre-linguistic beings were very different from us.

To understand the huge impact language has had on our evolution, it is necessary first of all to define and understand what this amazing, versatile all-human technology is and what it consists of. This is what Damiano Cantone, a philosopher, and Franco Fabbro, a neuropsychologist, do in this clear, careful, articulate essay. But since we can never step out of language, we cannot make it an object of research either, without being part of that object simultaneously. The real nature of language thus remains largely unknown.

To understand the “human difference”, the two authors analyse forms of animal communication which, however incredible it may seem, are very distant from the uniquely human tool that characterises us. For we humans, unlike animals, language is not something merely “available” to us but part of our deepest nature.

Recently, the appearance and success of digital technologies have brought profound changes to the way in which human beings relate to one another. Digital worlds have progressively become the world of our experience. Something similar happened about 80,000 years ago, when it was Homo sapiens who developed the ability to articulate language. From that moment on, the whole world itself has become language. With Artificial Intelligence are we perhaps witnessing a new paradigm shift?

Damiano Cantone, the holder of two doctorates, from the University of Trieste and “La Sapienza” University in Rome, teaches Philosophy of Language at the University of Udine. A member of the editorial staff on the magazines Aut Aut and Scenari, he has published Saggi di estetica del cinema (Essays on the Aesthetics of Cinema, 2012), Suspence! Il cinema della Possibilità (Suspence! The Cinema of Possibility, 2016) and Dal segno all’immagine. Saggio su Gilles Deleuze (From Sign to Image. An Essay on Gilles Deleuze, 2022).

Franco Fabbro has taught Human Philosophy and Child Neuropsychiatry and is currently the professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Udine. His books include: The Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism. An Introduction (1999), Neuropsicologia dell’esperienza religiosa (The Neuropsychology of Religious Experience, 2010), Le neuroscienze. Dalla fisiologia alla clinica (The Neurosciences. From physiology to clinical medicine, 2017) and Neuroscienze del bilinguismo. Il farsi e disfarsi delle lingue (with Elisa Cargnelutti, The Neurosciences of Bilinguism. The formation and destruction of languages, 2018,). With Bollati Boringhieri he has published Identità culturale e violenza. Neuropsicologia delle lingue e delle religioni (Cultural Identity and Violence. The neuropsychology of languages and religions, 2018).