And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,...
Genesis 1:24
Are you surprised?
Dogs can seem to tell our different languages but
have no neural preference.
"Dog brains can detect speech, and show different activity patterns
to a familiar and an unfamiliar language, a new brain imaging study by
researchers from the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University
(Hungary) finds. This is the first demonstration that a non-human brain
can differentiate two languages. 
When comparing brain responses to speech and non-speech, researchers
found distinct activity patterns in dogs’ primary auditory cortex. This
distinction was there independently from whether the stimuli originated
from the familiar or the unfamiliar language. There was, however, no
evidence that dog brains would have a neural preference for speech over
non-speech.
But the mechanism underlying this speech detection ability may be
different from speech sensitivity in humans: whereas human brains are
specially tuned to speech, dog brains may simply detect the naturalness
of the sound.
These language-specific activity patterns were found in another brain
region, the secondary auditory cortex. Interestingly, the older the dog
was, the better their brain distinguished between the familiar and the
unfamiliar language. “Each language is characterized by a variety of
auditory regularities. Our findings suggest that during their lives with
humans, dogs pick up on the auditory regularities of the language they
are exposed to,” says Hernández-Pérez." SciNews
