Whales communicate with a 'language-like' structure similar to humans

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In just a few weeks, complex, never-before-heard melodies sung by humpback whales can travel across thousands of kilometres of ocean.

These whale songs are sung by blokes as a way to charm a potential partner, and they can change and get more complex each year.

But are these songs just a batch of sounds, or do they reflect some parts of language?

today, research has discovered that songs produced by whales have fundamental structural similarities to human language, indicating that certain linguistic rules aren't exclusive to humans.

"We've had a pretty thorough look into humpback whale song," said Jenny Allen, a researcher specialising in whale behaviour at Griffith University in Australia and the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

We took the modelling from other studies on how babies and infants learn [the structure of language], and we applied it to how whales learn their songs.

Our books differ in terms of their architecture.

What is the structure behind human languages?

In the first half of the 20th century, linguist George Zipf discovered that within any given language, the most frequently used word (not surprisingly, in English it's "the") appears roughly double the occurrences of the second-placed word ("of"), while it appears roughly triple the occurrences of the third-ranked word ("and"), and this pattern continues.

Known as Zipf's rank frequency law, it's an interesting quirk of speech that ticks along with most human languages.

And the researchers wanted to know if it was also as effective with songs from whales.

The law is pretty easy to spot in human languages that we can understand. But it's not that simple to apply it to the complex and repetitive sounds whistled by whales.

To break down these complex mixes of sound, Dr Allen and an international team of researchers worked with a language expert to break down whale songs into their smallest parts.

What did they find?

The team used a modelling process called an 'infant-inspired segmentation pattern', which was originally developed to figure out how little kids pick up on the smallest bits of language.

Language is made up of sentences – a series of words linked together, and those words are formed from a sequence of sounds.

Applying this principle to eight years' worth of humpback whale recordings from a New Caledonian project called Operation Cétacés, the researchers were able to chop the whales' songs into smaller and smaller chunks.

When they examined these "chunks" in the context of Zipf's rank frequency law, they discovered it matched perfectly.

"Whales display the same structure in their songs, following many of the same rules that govern human language," Dr Allen said.

We were absolutely gobsmacked by the discovery.

Verifies the humpback whale song findings.

The researcher in that study took a comprehensive approach, comparing 16 whale species with 51 human languages, and found that many of the whale songs met the criteria for two other fundamental linguistic rules.

Stephanie King, a researcher at the University of Bristol who studies dolphin behaviour, comments that the humpback whale research reveals parallels between the way humans and whales pick up new skills.

"The blokes behind the research have shown that whale song's got the same statistical pattern as human language," Professor King said.

This likely explains how whales can pick up complex new tunes — in a similar way to how we learn a new language — using patterns to work out the connection between sounds.

Are whales talking?

While this research is exciting, Dr Allen notes that whale songs are not a form of communication in the same way humans knock off; tell each other.

"The key point is understanding that 'language-like' and 'language' are two different things," Dr Allen said.

While whales might use complex vocalisations as part of their mating ritual, there's no language or information actually contained within the sounds itself.

G'Day, I reckon [whale sounds] sounds like instrumental music. It's got a structure, a pattern to it, and it's always the same, innit?

It's learned, but that doesn't mean there's any logic or sense to it.

Instead, the researchers suggest that whale song and human language share the same structural elements because both are learned behaviours.

"The way we think they can learn their songs so quickly and efficiently, it's similar to how human babies do it," Dr Allen said.

Mason Youngblood from Stony Brook University and Andrew Whiten from the University of St Andrews reckon you should take a nuanced approach to the research, regarding the "note of caution about the tantalising" results as a valid consideration.

Similar results also come up when applying Zipf's rank frequency laws to things such as major city populations and gene expression, and some language experts reckon they might just be statistical anomalies.

However, Youngblood and Whiten also say that humpback whale songs offer "the most compelling case to date" that similarities in structure are due to learnt behaviour.

Dr Allen thinks future studies will likely confirm this theory, by demonstrating that other animals with comparable learnt behavioural traits, like birds, exhibit similar outcomes as well.

"I reckon future research will prove that this framework will be reflected in behaviour and actions that are taught through society and culture," she said.

It won't appear in species that already have built-in vocal tricks, or pick up language through trial and error.