Dolphins, like these bottlenose dolphins at Minnesota Zoo, are among the species whose complex communication may be trying to tell us something. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

From Suzanne Simard to Ed Yong, science journalists and researchers have probed the myriad ways plants and animals communicate: chemical signals amid old-growth redwoods, interplay between insects and their gut bacteria. But intra-species speech remains a discipline still unsure of itself. Are dolphin whistles a form of verbal exchange? Do hyrax “notes” constitute a vocabulary?

Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at Girton College, University of Cambridge, poses these issues in his breezy, provocative “Why Animals Talk,” lending sonic analysis and a musician’s ear to the study of animal communication.

In his opening, Kershenbaum asserts that “animals make a lot of noise, and that means they invest an awful lot of time and energy into being noisy. Evolution is economical — a behavior that wastes energy is something that should put you at a disadvantage in the long term.” Those screeches, hisses and yelps must confer Darwinian benefits, Kershenbaum argues. He focuses on six mammalian species — wolves, dolphins, hyraxes, gibbons, chimpanzees and homo sapiens — and one bird, parrots.

A wolf pack’s howls; intricate parrot squawks; chimpanzee “dictionaries” — each chapter is chock-full of tantalizing data. He applies Zipf’s law, a mathematical algorithm that captures the ratio of complexity and simplicity across all languages, to gibbons, with surprising results. He sorts through textured songs of hyraxes, which may comprise a rudimentary grammar. And he scrutinizes the century-long history of alleged human communication with chimps, our nearest primate relatives, with wry wit: “Early experiments were cute, if ethically questionable.”

Kershenbaum’s infectious zeal for the wonders of the biosphere set him apart as a 21st century Dr. Dolittle. We meet Alex, an African grey parrot who resided in a lab during the 1990s and 2000s. As Kershenbaum observes, Alex “not only learned to speak human words, but he also appeared to develop a subtle and language-like understanding of how words are used, how they are combined, and what the different combinations mean . . . the one individual animal that came closest to holding a direct conversation with a human was not a chimpanzee or a dolphin but a bird.”

“Why Animals Talk” fleshes out the author’s arguments with charts and graphs; fortunately, they don’t divert the book’s flow. Kershenbaum’s single misstep is his tone: he eschews an academic voice for a more conversational one, yielding the academic lectern for a kind of grade-school circle time.

Why Animals Talk (Penguin Press)

He’s targeting a popular audience but unwittingly patronizing readers: “What pieces of a puzzle needed to be fitted together to make humans so special?” And yet his concluding chapter on homo sapiens — our outsized self-importance, our languages a mere evolutionary adaptation, similar to a butterfly’s colors — rings with the clarity of a bell. He draws on figures such as Noam Chomsky as he drills down into why speech is a recent, possibly fleeting, phenomenon.

Despite our vaunted intelligence, we may be just another blip on this third rock from the sun. Kershenbaum seeks profundity among simple questions; and more often than not he’s able to find connection to a cosmos far beyond the scope of our brains. His book’s a trove of riches for animal lovers who sift through it with a proper grace and humility.

Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication

By: Arik Kershenbaum.

Publisher: Penguin Press, 288 pages, $30.