Professor Greg Radick (School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science) discusses his book The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which won the Suzanne J Levinson prize from the History of Science Society for the best book in the life sciences and natural history in 2010. In this interview, Greg discusses some of the key ideas which shaped the debate about animal language following Darwin, and some of the experiments which caught the popular imagination from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s.