A new study has found the song of humpback whales is a complex, culturally transmitted behaviour, and is structured in a way that the authors say challenges ‘long held assumptions about the uniqueness of human language’.
It well-known that whale song is a complex form of communication, but understanding the signals of an entirely alien species is far from straightforward.
While the ability to communicate vocally is widespread across the animal kingdom, the ability to string sounds together in a structured method – a language – has been considered a mostly human trait.
In simple terms, a language involves the repetition of words and phrases in a pattern that associates them with objects and actions, which is how human babies learn to speak and how, eventually, they will pass this ability to their own offspring.
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The new study applied methods inspired by how human babies learn new words to humpback whale recordings collected over eight years in the waters of the South Pacific islands of New Caledonia.
The researchers found the whales’ songs have the same statistical structures of repetition that are present in human languages, something not previously detected in any other species.
The distribution of the repetitions followed a pattern that implies the whales’s song is culturally transmitted, in that – like humans – it is passed on from adults to infants, which the scientists say demonstrates a unique commonality between two completely unrelated species.
‘[the study] suggests that our understanding of the evolution of language can benefit not only from looking at our closest primate relatives, but also at cases of convergent evolution elsewhere in nature,’ said Professor Simon Kirby of the Centre for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, one of the study’s lead authors.
‘Looking beyond the way language is used to express meaning, we should consider how language is learned and transmitted culturally over multiple generations.
‘These findings challenge long held assumptions about the uniqueness of human language, uncovering deep commonalities between evolutionarily distant species.’
The research paper ‘Whale song shows language-like statistical structure’ is published in the online jounral Science
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