[glacier5674]

> shared experiences and emotions

I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.

Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.