Whale Song And Human Language Share Same Structure, Research Shows

The scientists analysed the groans, moans, whistles, barks, shrieks and squeaks in humpback whale song recordings collected over eight years in New Caledonia.

“We found something truly fascinating,” says Dr Emma Carroll, a marine biologist at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. “Their noises and our words share a common pattern.”

This doesn’t mean whales have language, but it could point to similarities in how two evolutionarily distant species’ communication systems have evolved and how they are learned.

Across human languages, the most used word appears about twice as often as the second most common word, three times as much as the third most common word and so on. This is called Zipf’s Law. The words used most frequently are very short, such as “the”, “of”, and “and”.

Dividing the whale song into segments, the researchers found the same rules of frequency and brevity apply.

In a paper published in the journal Science, the researchers argue that the structure may aid “learnability,” just as it would for humans.

The research was led by Professor Inbal Arnon of the Hebrew University in Israel who’s a specialist in language acquisition in children. The senior author was Dr Ellen Garland of the University of St Andrews in the UK, a humpback whale song expert.

Carroll, a co-author of the paper, is an expert in whale genetics who has worked with Garland on understanding the evolutionary basis of whale song.

Humpback whale song is one of the most complex acoustic displays in the animal kingdom, a striking example of a socially learned, culturally transmitted behaviour. Only performed by males, the song likely plays a role in the selection of mates.

A song can last for as long as twenty minutes and involves many sound types arranged into a pattern.

“Of course, there are many differences between whale song and human language,” the researchers write in the paper. “Most importantly, expressions in language have semantic content. The meaning of sentences is composed of the meanings of the parts and how they are put together. We make no such claim for whale song. We have little understanding of the ‘meaning’ of the songs, let alone the different units, for humpback whales.”

Once thought to be unique to humans, it may transpire that foundational aspects of human language are shared across species, the researchers say.

Professor Simon Kirby of the University of Edinburgh, an expert in the evolution of language, and Dr Claire Garrigue, a marine biologist who has studied humpback whales in New Caledonia for over 30 years, were also key contributors to the research.

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