For years, humans have been studying the language of whales, identifying different factors in their interspecies communication.
But now, a group of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Edinburgh have revealed that humpback whale song follows statistical patterns similar to those of human language, which could change our understanding of animal communication.
Researchers studied more than 30 hours of recordings of whales near New Caledonia and found that the sounds emitted by these whales comply with Zipf's Law, a linguistic principle that states that the most frequently used words in a language appear more frequently and are usually shorter to optimize communication.
To conclude this, they applied an algorithm designed to detect patterns in sounds, similar to the one human babies use to learn words in their native language. The results showed that whales organize their sounds in a similar way to human speech.
These new findings suggest that cultural transmission and learning may influence communication across very different species.
Although the mystery about the exact purpose of whale song persists, these findings suggest that the evolutionary distance between humans and these marine giants might not be so great when it comes to the way we structure our communication.