Carlos Solis
By decoding the acoustic communication of sperm whales, a team of scientists from the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) and the University of California, Berkeley discovered common patterns in the language of these marine mammals and humans.
For the first time, researchers identified vowel sounds in sperm whales that were previously thought to be unique to humans. Sperm whales can, in fact, alter the frequency of their clicks to produce sounds like “a” and “i.”
The fact that sperm whales structure and repeat these complex sounds suggests these sounds play a significant role in their social lives.
What Did the Scientists Discover?
The sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) is the largest member of the toothed whales, the largest marine predator, and has the biggest brain of any animal. Scientists have long sought to decode whale language and even communicate with them. While the idea may seem far-fetched, researchers have made significant strides in unraveling the surprisingly complex communication of these large marine mammals in recent years.
Recently, while listening to sperm whale conversations, researchers made an intriguing discovery. They found that in their vocalizations, sperm whales use both single and double vowel sounds. This doubling of vowels is known as a diphthong. The existence of this feature in whale communication could change our understanding of non-human intelligence.
“This opens up an entirely new chapter in our understanding of sperm whale communication. We now know that sperm whales have structures similar to vowels and diphthongs, and that they have developed a completely independent way of producing vowels,” said David Gruber, founder and president of the CETI project, in an interview with IFLScience.
Mastering Animal Language
Studying animal communication is a challenging task for humans, because researchers bring the biases inherent in human communication to the work. One of the key objectives of the CETI project, which focuses on decoding whale sounds, is to find ways to overcome those biases.
One such bias relates to rhythm: human voices are produced by vocal cords that vibrate much faster than the phonic lips cetaceans use to make sounds.
Considering this difference, scientists noticed something remarkable. The vocalizations of sperm whales exhibited patterns that corresponded to the patterns of human vowels, Gruber noted. Moreover, these patterns were so distinct that they could be transcribed using human sounds like “a” and “i.”
These sounds could also combine, creating a vocal pattern similar to a diphthong.
The Evolution of Language Patterns
This extraordinary discovery demonstrates that sperm whale communication is far more complex than we previously thought. It shares more similarities with human language than one might imagine. Thanks to this finding, scientists are gaining a deeper understanding of how the structural elements of language have evolved in both animals and humans.
“From a linguistic perspective, the similarity to the human vowel system is fascinating,” added Gasper Beguš, head of the linguistic department of the CETI project. “The presence of stable patterns resembling vowels and diphthongs indicates a level of phonetic complexity that was previously thought to be unique to humans. Thus, the structural elements of language are more universal across species than we assumed,” he concluded.
The research findings were published in the journal Open Mind.
Photo: Unsplash
