Hello friends!! 
Did you know that pigeons and doves are the same type of bird? 
They are in the same scientific family, Columbidae. I actually didn’t know this until I started learning Korean! In Korean both pigeons and doves are referred to using the same word. Today I wanted to investigate what languages actually have this linguistic split and why? 
First, let’s talk about languages which have only one word to refer to the whole family! In Korean, 비둘기 (bi-dool-gi) is used to describe both pigeons and doves. The word itself was based in the unique cooing noise made by the bird. In Korean this sound is described as 구구 (goo-goo) similar to the coo coo sound used in English. This is the case in many languages around the world, with other examples being Japanese, which uses 鳩 (hato), and Romanian, using Porumbel. While these words have different etymological roots to the Korean word, the premise remains the same. The entire Columbidae family is grouped under a single name in most places around the world.
So why does English use different words for pigeons and doves? The word pigeon has its origins in French, and the word dove has Germanic origins. If you were not already familiar, English is a weird amalgamation of the Romance and Germanic language families! It originally had heavily West Germanic roots, but after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the French took over England. This meant that English aristocrats largely spoke French at the time. Now, many of the more formal words in English are derived from French, and less formal words are derived from their original Germanic roots. (Think of how the word ‘love’ is similar to the German word ‘liebe’ but the more fancy word ‘adore’ is the same as the French word ‘adore’)
ANYWAYS!! Rant over!! The word pigeon came from a word in Old French, ‘pijon’ which came from the Latin word ‘pipio’ which just generally referred to a young bird, attempting to mimic its cheeping noise. The word dove come from the Old English word ‘dūfe’. The exact origin of this word is uncertain, but some linguists believe it to be related to an ancient Indo-European root meaning ‘to dive’ and perhaps relates to the bird’s flight patterns.
So what about French itself? I think one of the interesting things about this linguistic split is that it doesn’t line up precisely with the English one. Because no scientific split exists, different languages split different species into different categories! Currently French uses the word pigeon for pigeons, and has a similar usage to the English word pigeon. It follows the same Latin root mentioned above. The word colombe refers to doves and is derived from the Latin colomba. This is usually used to refer to the symbolic white dove commonly associated with Christianity. Finally, the word tourterelle refers specifically to turtle doves.
So do all European languages use the different words for pigeons and doves? Actually no! Many Germanic languages never adopted a word from the Romance languages to refer to pigeons, and up until the modern day only have one word to cover both pigeons and doves coming from the same Proto-Germanic root that gave us the word dove in English! Examples of this include Taube in German and duif in Dutch.
Anyways, all of this is just to say that pigeons and doves are in the exact same family of bird and whether we refer to each species as either pigeons or doves is actually largely based in history as opposed to biology!
I’m definitely not an expert on birds or linguistics or really anything close and I just researched into this and wrote it for fun so please don’t take anything I said here too seriously and do your own research! Also if you have read this far into this definitely silly and useless blog post then thank you very much hehe 