When most people think about language, they think about information transfer—sending facts from one brain to another through words, gestures, or signs. That’s how we’re taught to understand it: as a neutral, almost mechanical process of transmitting knowledge. But when I spent several years in the forests of Borneo teaching sign language to orangutans, I began to see communication differently. Not as the exchange of data, but as a subtle—and sometimes not-so-subtle—form of control.
And not me controlling them—often, it was the other way around.
