How do dragons communicate?

Question

Dragons are giant intelligent monitor lizards. They are intelligent enough to communicate in a human-like manner. They can hiss, but can't make anymore complex sounds. They are also quadrupedal, and too heavy to stand on their hindlegs alone. How could they communicate?

Answer 1

Smell and rumble

Lizards are known to communicate with smells. Although this is probably not as sophisticated for normal lizards, it has great potential. Smell is incredibly complex in both production and the smelling. If this can be controlled to a great degree, the communication can give both a wide range of emotions as well as complex language. Like sound, it fades over distance, but more susceptible to wind. Also the message becomes more garbled the further it goes, but emotion likely stays in tact. Furthermore they can leave messages for others at places, much like a dog peeing. Rubbing off some smells at a common place can be enough to convey messages over longer periods of time.

Another is rumbling. Elephants use a deep rumble to communicate over large distances, which these big lizards are also likely to do. The complexity can be done via very subtly changing the sounds of the rumble.

Answer 2

Telepathy

I mean, I hate to leave what's essentially a one-word answer, but it pretty much speaks for itself. You might say "But telepathy isn't real". Well, neither are dragons. And you'd hardly be the first writer to make telepathic dragons, it's almost a trope, it's so common.

Answer 3

Facial gestures.

Dragons are often portrayed with frills, spines, jowls, and other protrusions on their heads for no readily apparent reason. Many animals use their headgear - ears, whiskers, and the like - to communicate; cats and dogs are well-known for their expressive ears, for instance. (Of course, cats and dogs are also known for using their tails. Guess what else dragons also prominently have?)

Facial and body language would allow dragons to have a means of expression that doesn't rely on breathing, so it's more reliable while flying or belching fire on attacking knights or what have you.

Answer 4

Smoke signals

The archetypal Western dragon is naturally able to breathe fire, so a useful byproduct in this case is smoke. The same muscles that enable the dragon to control its propulsion of fire(or a flaming something) out of its body would also allow it to control the attributes of the resultant smoke. It may prove inconvenient to have to incinerate something in the vicinity every time a dragon has to "talk", so it's likely dragons have adapted to hold the flaming whatever within its body while expelling controlled bursts of smoke through its nostrils or whatever other orifices are available.

Answer 5

They don't need to.

Larger animals need more food. The larger a species, the lower its population density can be based on resources. This is especially true for predators, since around 90 percent of the energy is lost at each step in a food chain. The population of a large predatory species such as a dragon will necessarily be much smaller than the population of its prey.

A lone dragon is probably capable of killing anything it needs to without assistance from another dragon, and is dangerous enough that it is probably an apex predator with nothing to fear from other species. Dragons don't need to live together with other dragons. Reptiles in general tend to be solitary, or not work together when gathered in one place. For example, vipers may sleep in large groups to conserve heat, but no communication is required.

So the question becomes, "Why do dragons need to communicate?"

If they need to mark their territory to prevent encroachment from other dragons, their options may include scratching trees (like bears) or scent marking (like cats). Lizards will use bright colors to signal that they are looking for mates.

Reptiles are not social animals, so they have no need to have developed a complex mode of communication, or even enough intelligence to support it.

Zach Weinersmith explains the issue succinctly.

Answer 6

Infrasound transmitted via the ground, using their feet as sender/receiver.

This additionally allows them to have an overview of their surrounding without having to rely on sight.

If I remember correctly, elephants use something similar.

Answer 7

By dancing.

Dragons tend to be pretty solitary animals. They rarely have a need to communicate with each other aside from to discuss territorial disputes and to impress mates. In both of these situations being having enough energy to preform complex dance moves is beneficial both to intimidate and impress.

It isn’t exactly a language however it doesn’t have words and it works more like interpretive dance the dragons use metaphor and symbolism to convey their messages.

It also lends it self pretty well to something like a writing system — it’s a long held tradition for dragons to meticulously prepare a large flat pad of soft mud by carrying mouth fulls of water to a suitable area and using their legs to spread the mud into one flat layer. During their dances the dragons will leave behind a distinctive pattern of foot prints that after being dried with a little fire breath forms a record of the interaction. Most dragon layers are surrounded with these patterns recording contracts, mates, and even poetry and stories.

Many dragons even have taken to going on tours of various territories every few centuries read the mud flats and watch whatever dance moves the dragons have been practicing. This while risky for dragons has created a boom in dragon art and poetry.

Answer 8

Odours - Consequences

This was meant a s comment to @Trioxidane answer but go too long:

Odours as the primary form of communication form has several "disadvantages":

• Producing different pheromones/hormones is hard and need genetic requirements. Even then, it's hard to convey complex information. I'd say to estimate how many odours they'd need to be able to produce to mimic human-like communication is similar to the number of Chinese characters or to Egypt hieroglyphs: About 5,000-10,000. For comparison: The human body emits ~100 hormones.
• Based on the previous point, producing odours is given by their genetics. If they don't interact regularly and update their vocabulary (like humans did in history), they won't be very innovative in their language. This means they will probably only be able to communicate "natural" information: "Fear", "Anger", "Happiness" rather than "What is the meaning of life?".
• Depending on how fast they can emit different odours and how fast they can smell it sets how fast they can communicate. Realistically this is a rather slow process compared to communicating via sound as the required mechanisms to produce odours is of chemical nature, compared to sound (mechanical). The odours need to be very complex or communications will need much longer via odours than via sound.
• The speed of particles in air is much much smaller than the speed of sound (~10cm/s compared to 330m/s). This means they need to come close to each other to communicate or will have a long delay when talking to each other. Also they would need to wait until the odours diffuse away before continuing the discussion, which introduces another delay in their communication.
• Odours are not suited to communicate over long distances, or only when using wind and emitting a LOT of hormones/pheromones. Using wind means it is a one way communication method.
• Communicating with different participates is hard when all the smells mix. Communication will need to take place in very small groups.

All points that somehow fit to dragons. Considering the above points a communication using odours would look like this: One dragon attracts another dragon either via sound or by some other means. The two dragons then gather very close somewhere, one dragon emits a very complex odour conveying natural information like "Fear". They wait 10 minutes until the smell is gone and the air is pure again, which is necessary to not mix the very complex odors needed to have complex communication. Then the other dragon emits "Surprise", asking why the other dragon has fear. They wait again, and so on. Depended on how often every part needs to say something, I'd estimate this discussion would take ~100-1000 times longer than a comparable human communication.