It's not language. It's basically mimicking humans.

Noam Chomsky on Nim Chimpsky and the Emergence of Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a39vcatTCVU

Chomsky has a few other interviews where he addresses this.

> It's not language. It's basically mimicking humans.

I owned a parrot for a few years. The speech she had was like a tape recorder, she could mostly only play back what she heard in an identical manner. But she was able to play back pieces of appropriate snippets in the right context to express herself to a level that I'd call it talking. It's not normal "speech", but if you gave an otherwise normal human with damaged speech centers in their brain a tape recorder it's very much like that.

You don’t need a language to communicate (ask my cat — or any cat/dog). You also don’t need words, but colloquially, “talking” means using words, not using language. Someone talking to you with random noises you can reproduce would still be called “talking” whether or not it was a language.

In other words a baby saying “milk” because it wants milk doesn’t mean you should ignore it because it isn’t using a “language.”

> (ask my cat

Ok. Hi cat. Do you need language to communicate? Plz respond.

You are correct. It is speech not language.

But it's almost not communicating as humans do -- something most commenters are implying.