But I don't see what that has to do with consciousness, to me animal language is much closer to consciousness than human language. Consciousness is all about emotions, not language, and animal language that humans also has is directly tied to emotional expression. Our ML models managed to mimic human language before animal language, human language is more robotic.
Sci-fi shows tend to also do this, robots talk with voices that lacks the animal components of humans and instead just do the human language. So the popular view is that animal language is the conscious parts and human language is the computational/intelligence part.