Well, yeah. 
From a rando on Reddit:
ELI5: How do the buttons that allow dogs to talk work? Are they real?
The buttons are real. The dogs are real. The communication isn’t. They just learn a certain button or combination of buttons gets them a treat.
The answer above is very concise, but also incorrect. But it has the flavor of some of the critiques of Koko et al studies. According to this view, the chimps weren’t really learning words, but rather they were responding with operant conditioning, or another minimalist interpretation that Skinner and his followers favored, popular in the 1950s-1970s.
Animal communication exists and it appears that dogs and chimps are capable of learning words. That isn’t human language because it lacks syntax. But it seems to be more than the simple pursuit of treats - not that there’s anything wrong with that! 
Another uncritically accepted report from that era was of the Tasaday, reportedly a primordially unchanged Stone Age tribe in a remote section of the Philippines. It was later concluded that they were the descendants of Filipinos who had fled into the jungles to avoid slave raids some three hundred or so years earlier. Apparently there were a lot of claims that people at the time wanted to be true because they fit in with the cultural zeitgeist.
Just saw this recent NatGeo article on the status of the last two surviving “talking” chimpanzees:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chimpanzee-sign-language-experiments
The article talks about the ASL experiments but then focuses on the ethics of keeping chimpanzees in captivity.
“Possibly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, there. It might be, in the sense that we don’t know, because we don’t know much at all about whalesong. But I don’t think anyone (or at least, anyone reputable) is claiming that whalesong is unambiguously language.
Spock knows. 
So does your dog only use the ones you mentioned? Or are there others as well?
You can have a diatribe in ASL. An ape can’t. But one of my lit professors at Gally sure could.
Fido is hungry
When I want to play I will
Nip you in the ass
Are there studies that back this up?
If a dog learns that pressing a certain button gets them a treat and another button let’s them go outside, I question whether that is actually learn a word. Isn’t that more akin to rats pressing levers to get treats?
Uh uh. Bayliss says “harrumph”(not really).
But he does punch “love you” regularly. All he gets is a “love you” back. So maybe he just likes the way I say it.
I’m away from home at this time. My daughter is telling me he’s punching “bye” “hmmm?'“ on repeat.
Now, we say/think he’s asking where I am. Ehh. Who knows what his doggy genius brain is thinkin’?
I like to know I’m missed at home. 
Sure. But not conclusively AFAIK. Which is not much: I’ve just poked around on the internet. There are those who maintain that Alex the bird was exhibiting the results of operant conditioning, eg Chandler (2007). Cite.
Wiki has an article on animal language – a much narrower and only partially understood subset of animal communication. I found this conceptual framework to be interesting:
The American linguist Charles Hockett theorized that there are sixteen features of human language that distinguish human communication from that of animals. He called these the design features of language. The features mentioned below have so far been found in all spoken human languages, and at least one is missing from any other animal communication system.
Orca communication is transmitted culturally, which is one component of Hockett’s list. It’s also observed outside of laboratory settings, without human instruction. But it’s difficult for land-dwelling primates to work out what if anything they are saying.
I opine that Skinner frameworks are an improvement over Freudian ones, but are in the end simplistic. Have they been falsified? I’m not sure. They have gone out of fashion I think. I am not a psychologist.
To those who read the above Wiki:
The iconicity of signed languages is often exaggerated, and any that do happen to have some, do as a rule lose it through time. Moreover, people understand them regardless of realizing anything of their origin. You don’t have to be a farm kid to learn “milk.” A kid from 21st c. Morningside Heights who has never seen a cow will learn it just as easily.
Here it is. It’s an example of both features, BTW, its being a very old lexical item in ASL.
On top of that, I argued in a paper I wrote as a college junior that got me a bit of wunderkind cred, for a few weeks anyway, that oral words are more onomatopoeic than we [hearing people] tend to think of them. You can list adjectives that describe similar things, and find they share similar phonemes, and other features, like numbers of syllables. Would “bam” have found success in the comic book industry if it were, say, “violin”? though they both make a lot of noise.
I was more detailed than that, though-- I had very specific examples-- like that a sound shared by lots of words that mean “little,” or some variation thereof have a sound that uses a small mouthshape.
I even discussed the differences among words in English derived from different languages, and how they had different aesthetics, but they still lent themselves ultimately to the way a word felt. I seem to recall digging up some examples of recent loan words that were isolated from whole language confluence, and how they tended to change more or less depending on how they already conformed to English aesthetics.
I don’t have a copy anymore. I wrote it in 1987 or 88. So I don’t know how well it really holds up, but I do know that there was a Gallaudet professor who got hold of it from one of my professors, and then used it in one of her classes.
I don’t think that is unreasonable, or beyond a dog’s mental ability.
Dogs certainly are aware of our presence, and when we are not around (my mom’s dog used to mope when she would leave). And a dog can understand that “bye” means leave (I mean, dogs learn words; and bye is the kind of word that you’d tend to say whenever you leave, so they could make the connection). And dogs certainly have thoughts and feelings (ever have a dog who really wants a walk? They may whimper until you say okay, then get crazy excited when you agree, even before you actually go outside).
So I don’t think it’s a wild stretch to think that your dog is wondering where you are, and is using the word “bye” to express his frustration/confusion.
My dog knows the name of her daycare-- which she loves, and a million sonnets cannot describe her joy when she hears me say its name. She can jump 4 feet straight up, I swear. She even knows the name of the manager, Ashley, so if she hears me on the phone ask for “Ashley,” she seems to know I’m arranging a daycare date, and she’ll do a mini-joy dance, and bark a little towards the phone-- so she’s processing a future event, somehow.
Dogs have a longer history with people than any other creature.
We know which wolf species (the Gray Wolf) gave us dogs, because they still share mitochondrial DNA, and so we know the split took place 35-40,000 years ago. Archeological evidence shows us the dog/human relationship firmly established by 14,000 years ago.
We didn’t even domesticate food animals until 10,000 years ago, and then, there’s no relationship, like there is with dogs.
Cats were domesticated about the same time as food animals, which is a little after plants, so they were probably brought on board for ratting and mousing, which drove rats and mice from grain storage into the house, so the cats came into the house (no cite, but I have read that numerous time, starting with my first cat book when I was about 8).
The first interaction between human and non-human apes, aside from tribal wars with H. erectus, and poaching for zoos, was as recent as Jane Goodall’s work. Read something from the 1930 written about chimps or gorillas. It’ll blow your mind.
My point is, while at first blink, it seems that our closest genetic relatives would be our best bet for a linguistic connection, a bit of thought suggests that maybe the creatures with whom we have an established symbiosis, and pretty long one, might be better (whom do you share a symbiosis with? Spouse, or closest genetic relative?) The estimated time that fully modern humans (as opposed to early modern-- the H. sapiens vs. the H. sapiens sapiens-- a distinction I’m aware not all people like, but bear with me) have been around is between 160-90,000 years. Dogs split from wolves about 40,000 years ago.
We’ve been together a very long time.
Cats, who come next-- far, far longer than chimps, but not as long as dogs, love pets, and warmth, and probably cherish familiarity, and do seem to be very upset at the loss of a person (or another cat, and sometimes even a dog) in the house. But they don’t know us like dogs do.
Right at this moment, my cat is sleeping on one side of me, purring, and my dog is on the other, snoring, and may have also farted, and I love them both. And elegance is not necessary for devotion.
To describe something that is a fact of literature, which it stole from life, the guy who’s “down” understands the mind of the guy who’s “up,” but not the other way around.
And I’m not now waxing PETA, and no, pets are not slaves. But your dog does a lot of the work when the two of you communicate. She wants to understand and to be understood as much as you do. She does not want to discuss politics or religion, but she probably does have an opinion about the weather, would like to tell you about it, and would like to know what is being done about it.
Chimps don’t know what the hell we are, care nothing for us-- wait-- we have grapes? Oh. That they care about a little. Ten grapes later, we can stuff it. They want to play on the swings.
It’s as if we have the same dog and cat!
Oh, like the Bouba/Kiki Effect?
Well, fundamentally, all language may be a “pursuit of treats.” Most people enjoy conversation.
And there’s a WHOLE lot of languaging going on and into the Starbucks industry. They have like, 8 different words for “coffee,” and 5 for “cup.”
The toddlers I work with are endlessly pursuing treats-- snacks, that’s one word every single one can say. And they all at least understand “Big room,” an indoor room with 2 big climbers, slides, toys and puzzles, balls, trikes, a big play kitchen, lots and lots of big Legos, and a big space just to run.
They all know that a smile can get them a hug, but so can tears, and so can just holding up their arms. A lot of them are now learning that right after they do something wrong on purpose, crying and asking for a hug is not a Get-out-of-Jail-Free card at school like it is at home.
The amount of communication tools they have assimilated in 14-20 months (it’s a mixed group) is amazing, and I understand why every parent thinks their kid is a genius.
Anyway, my dog pursues all sorts of things that are “treats,” but not the edible kind. Play-wrestle is her favorite treat, and belly-scratches are #2.
There’s definite Venn overlap, but I didn’t know about it at the time (and wouldn’t for a while-- Google search was 10 years away at the time, 14 years away from me, and Wikipedia, 13 years away.
Also, I had a mechanism worked out that preceded the current one, but was just based on personal experience and analysis, info from a “stage diction” workshop I took once in high school, which, among other things, discussed why certain words became expletives (ie: why “shit,” but not “bowel movements,” or “excreta”), and an interpreters’ workshop I attended that talked about mouthshapes, where someone commented that “little” words were “literally harder to see [for a lip-reader] because your mouth is smaller when you say them.”
And, I had never even heard of synesthesia, let alone been told by a physician, then a PhD in psychology in therapy practice (to whom the physician referred me), and then a psychiatrist, because it sounded nuts to me, that I had it.
Great posts from you in this thread. Thanks.