Dr. Slobodchikoff was able to interpret the calls by videotaping everything, analyzing the sound spectrum, and then watching the video to see what the prairie dog making a distress call was reacting to when he made it. He also watched to see how the other prairie dogs responded. That was an important clue, because he found that the prairie dogs reacted differently to different warnings. If the warning was about a hawk making a dive, all the prairie dogs raced to their burrows and vanished down into holes. But if the hawk was circling overhead, the prairie dogs stopped foraging, stood up in an alert posture, and waited to see what happened next. If the call warned about a human, the prairie dogs all ran for their burrows no matter how fast the human was coming.
Dr. Slobodchikoff also found evidence that prairie dogs arent born knowing the calls, the way a baby is born knowing how to cry. They have to learn them. He bases this on the fact that the different prairie dog colonies around Flagstaff all have different dialects. Since genetically these animals are almost identical, Dr. Slobodchikoff argues that genetic differences cant explain the differences in the calls. That means the calls have been created by the individual colonies and passed on from one generation to the next.
Is this "real" language? A philosopher of language might say no, but the case against animal language is getting weaker. Different linguists have somewhat different definitions of language, but everyone agrees that language has to have meaning, productivity (you can use the same words to make an infinite number of now communications), and displacement (you can use language to talk about things that arent present).
Prairie dogs use their language to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning.
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