A woman recently made an unexpected discovery about her rescue dog after noticing the canine’s striking enthusiasm when she heard people speak Spanish.
Michele Ost told Newsweek that she first noticed her dog, Honey, reacting strongly to Spanish during a walk. The pair passed a group of people speaking the language when Honey suddenly perked up, became visibly excited and attempted to approach them. Curious, Ost began experimenting with Spanish commands at home.
“When I got home, I tried a couple of commands, which the video is a result of,” she said. “That was my very first time trying the commands in Spanish and she immediately listened!”
In her June 2 TikTok video posted to her account @michiedevin, Ost first asks Honey to sit in Spanish—”siéntate”—which the dog immediately follows. Impressed by the response, Ost then issues additional commands, all of which Honey responds to correctly, prompting Ost to praise her in Spanish. Ost realized her dog is “fluent.”
From that point on, Ost began regularly using Spanish with Honey and said her dog’s “whole world has lit up.”
Looking back, she is not entirely surprised by her dog’s responsiveness, noting the dog was originally rescued in Mexico as a stray. Ost adopted Honey from the Humane Society of San Diego in October 2025 during a “clear the shelter” event.
She had gone in with no expectations, but says she was immediately drawn to the dog tucked near the end of one of the shelter’s final rows, and requested to meet her. Once the staff let Honey out, the dog instantly put her paws on Ost’s lap.
“I sat down on the ground to get down on her level, and she leaned her head right into my heart,” she said. “In that moment, I knew I could not leave without her.”
Honey had a complicated spay surgery shortly before Ost met her, with the dog nearly passing. She was “beyond anemic” when Ost arrived, but Honey still wagged her tail and showed how much love she had to give.
While her TikTok video has gone viral, garnering over 2 million views, the realization of Honey’s Spanish fluency has become personal for her. She grew up attending a Spanish-immersion school in San Diego and became fluent from a young age.
“Unfortunately, I am the only person in my family who speaks Spanish, so I have lost a lot of it because I haven’t been using it much,” she said. “Adopting Honey and realizing Spanish is her native language has inspired me to begin using it again.”
Do Dogs Understand Multiple Languages?
While dogs don’t process language the way humans do, there is evidence they may be able to learn and distinguish between more than one set of verbal cues, according to a vet-reviewed article from Dogster. Dogs can appear to respond differently depending on the language being used, especially when those commands are consistently paired with specific actions, tone and body language.
The article notes that while it’s not fully proven that dogs “understand” languages in a human sense, they can learn distinct command systems across multiple languages. Because dogs are skilled at pattern recognition, they can associate different words in different languages with the same behavior, such as “sit” in English and “siéntate” in Spanish.
In other words, a dog responding to Spanish commands isn’t necessarily “bilingual” but rather highly observant and trained through repetition and reinforcement. Still, for many dog owners, it can feel like their pets are genuinely switching between languages depending on who is speaking and what they’ve been trained to respond to.
Read the full article here
