2025-02-09 09:25:47
Whale song is remarkably similar to human speech.
Experts were left with “goosebumps” when their work revealed a hidden structure inside the calls made by humpback whales is the same as a fundamental pattern that features in almost all human languages.
The experts found that whale song followed Zipf’s law, a rule found in the majority of human languages that says the most frequent word (‘the’ in English) is used twice as much as the second most frequent word (‘of’).
It is the first time that Zipf’s law has been discovered in the speech of another species.
Dr. Simon Kirby, head of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of the study, said: “It was one of those moments that was just total goosebumps.
“I saw the graph appear and I thought, ‘I can’t believe this’.
“What we’ve uncovered here is a deep commonality between two species separated by 70 or 80 million years of evolution. The common ancestor of whales and humans was probably some little shrew-like creature.”
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