Study Reveals Similarities Between Whale Songs and Human Language

Researchers have discovered that the sounds emitted by humpback whales follow patterns similar to human communication. The analysis, published in the journal Science, showed that these animals’ vocalizations adhere to Zipf’s Law, a mathematical principle that governs the frequency of words in a language.

Zipf’s Law, developed by linguist George Kingsley Zipf, indicates that the most commonly used words in a language appear more frequently and tend to be shorter. The study revealed that the sounds produced by humpback whales follow this same statistical logic.

The research was conducted by Inbal Arnon from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in collaboration with Simon Kirby from the University of Edinburgh and Ellen Garland from the University of St. Andrews. The team analyzed 30 hours of whale song recordings collected over eight years in the New Caledonia region. To identify sound patterns, they used an algorithm inspired by the infant learning process. In one of the recordings from 2010, the most common sound sequence, described as “moan-moan-lament,” was used twice as often as the second most frequent sequence. Additionally, researchers noticed that the most frequent sequences were shorter, a pattern also present in human language.

According to Arnon, the study reinforces the influence of learning and cultural transmission on the structure of communication systems. The next step in the research is to expand the analysis to other species, such as birds, bats, and elephants, to determine if similar patterns occur.

Another recent study indicated that Menzerath-Altmann’s Law, which states that longer phrases tend to have shorter words, can also be applied to the communication of humpback whales and 11 other cetacean species. This further supports the idea that statistical principles of human language may be present in various forms of animal communication.

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